Objectivity and the Silence of Reason: Weber, Habermas, and the Methodological Disputes in German Sociology [Reprint ed.] 0765800535, 9780765800534

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ZZZURXWOHGJHFRP

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

Weber, Habermas, and the Methodological Disputes in German Sociology

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason GeorgeE.McCarthy

First published 2001 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, N ew York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2001 by Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part o f this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library o f Congress Catalog Number: 2001027004 Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, George E. Objectivity and the silence o f reason : Weber, Habermas, and the m ethodological disputes in German sociology / George E. McCarthy, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0053-5 (alk. paper) 1. S ociology— Germany— History. 2. Sociology— Germany— Methodology. 3. Habermas, Jergen. 4. Weber, Max, 1864-1920. I. Title.

HM 477 .G3 M33 2001 301 ’.0943— d c2 1 ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0053-4 (hbk)

2001027004

For m y son and daughter D e v in and A le x a w ith lo v e

“Natural science gives us an answer to the question o f what we must do if we wish to master life technically....Science contributes to the technology o f con­ trolling life by calculating external objects as w ell as m an’s activities.” — Max Weber “If he were to cling to his scientistic theory consistently, he would have to admit that there are no horrible actions or inhuman conditions, and that the evil he sees is just an illu sion ... .Reason has liquidated itself as an agency o f ethical, moral, and religious insight.” — Max Horkheimer “[Positivism] silences any binding reflection beyond the boundaries o f the em pirical-analytical (and formal) sciences...w hole problem areas would have to be excluded from discussion and relinquished to irrational attitudes.” “If practical [ethical and political] questions, which involve the adoption o f standards, are withdrawn from rational discussion, and if only technologically exploitable knowledge is considered to be reliable, then only the instrumental­ ist values o f efficiency participate in what is left o f rationality.” — Jürgen Habermas “Let Feyerabend stand before the ovens o f Dachau or the ditch o f M ylai and say that our scientific understanding o f sociocultural system s is ultimately noth­ ing but an ‘aesthetic judgment.’” — Marvin Harris “Reason is calculative; it can assess truths o f fact and mathematical relations but nothing more. In the realm o f practice it can speak only o f means. About ends it must be silent.” — Alasdair MacIntyre

Contents Introduction: The Social Construction of Methods: Rethinking Social Science with Weber and Habermas

1

Part 1: Methodological Disputes in the Nineteenth Century: Neo-Kantianism, Existentialism, and the German Historical School 1. Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity: Kant and Rickert

27

2. Kantian Existentialism and the Warring Gods of Modernity: From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche

69

3. Max Weber and the Kantians: Epistemology and Method in the Wissenschaftslehre

127

Part 2: Methodological Disputes in the Twentieth Century: Rationalism, Hermeneutics, and Critical Theory 4. Critical Rationalism and Critical Theory: Popper, Adorno, Habermas, and Albert

215

5. Reintegrating Science and Ethics: Explanatory, Interpretive, and Emancipatory Sociology in Habermas

267

Index

339

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professors Paul Roth and James Bohman, co-directors of the Summer NEH Institute on the Philosophy of So­ cial Science at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Missouri for the opportunity to continue work on this project. Many of my fellow colleagues and friends were in­ valuable in lending suggestions and editorial assistance to this project, including Royal Rhodes, Frank Lane, Tom Kessler, and Jane Brailove Rutkoff. As usual, I am also grateful to members of the Kenyon College library staff who provided me with help in times of frustra­ tion and confusion, especially Carol Marshall, Barbara Chambliss, Priscilla McIntosh, and Cindy Wallace. Two other members of the library staff deserve special mention for their general interest, en­ couragement, and help over the years: Jami Peelle and Carmen King.

Introduction The Social Construction of Methods: Rethinking Social Science with Weber and Habermas While issues of the philosophy of social science are being widely discussed in the American academy today, there also appears to be resistance to these discussions from many of the social scientists themselves as they continue to define more strictly, around behaviorist and positivist criteria, the concepts, methods, and theories ap­ propriate to scientific inquiry. It seems opportune then to return to some of the philosophical debates surrounding the origins of nine­ teenth- and twentieth-century German sociology in order to gain another perspective on these issues. This book is built around the two key figures of Max Weber and Jurgen Habermas and focuses on the debates over the nature of rationality, science, objectivity, and values. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been a vibrant and rich intellectual dispute about knowledge and truth in epistemology; concept formation, logic of analysis, and methodology in the social sciences; forms of objectivity in every­ day experience and science; and the relations among science, eth­ ics, and politics. These discussions have been articulated most forcefully in the methodological disputes within German and Austrian economics in the nineteenth century; neo-Kantianism, historicism, and positivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and the positivist debates involving American pragmatism (Willard Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty), critical rationalism (Karl Popper and Hans Albert), functionalism and systems theory (Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann), hermeneutics (Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg 1

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

Gadamer), and critical theory (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Habermas). With these discussions there has been a fundamen­ tal broadening of our understanding of the range of questions and methods of science into areas of historical meaning, cultural signifi­ cance, and underlying structures and subsystems of society. There has also been a recognition of the metaphysical and normative foun­ dations of science. Formerly, science was thought to reflect objec­ tive reality using a neutral method but has come to be viewed as consisting also of a subjectivity of interests and values. By returning to these disputes within sociology, we rediscover a wonderfully ex­ citing world of alternative views of science and rationality that have been lost to contemporary social science and may be usefully ap­ plied to a rethinking of many of these critical issues today. It is Weber’s philosophy of science (Wissenschaftslehre) which brings together the economic and neo-Kantian debates at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Habermas performs the same function at the end of the twentieth century by integrating the major works in pragmatism, functionalism, herme­ neutics, and critical theory. By examining Weber and Habermas, we are able to reconstruct the important epistemological and method­ ological disputes throughout the century and develop a more com­ plete overview of the logic and methods of social science. Weber and Habermas were chosen not only because they are arguably the greatest German social theorists of the twentieth century, but also because their writings on epistemology, philosophy of science, and sociological methods are derived from self-critical reflections on their own empirical research and social theories. For them, philosophy emerges naturally from sociology and is organically and internally related to the application of scientific inquiry. Philosophy of social science is not an isolated subdiscipline of another profession but a critical reflection on the foundations of sociology itself. Both Weber and Habermas are concerned with issues of objectiv­ ity and values in relation to science; both inquire into the nature of empirical facts and historical evidence, theory construction, and methods of validation and testing; both view value relevance and human interests as central to the construction of science; both reject the metaphysics of positivism and the epistemology of realism; both attempt to integrate the methods of understanding (interpretation) and explanation (causation) into their sociological analysis; both recognize the methodological importance of rationalization and

The Social Construction of Methods

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reification; and both relate their methodological writings to concrete empirical research. Also central to both authors is a concern with the role of reason in voicing values and ethical choices in social sci­ ence. Weber recognizes that the moderns live in a moral universe inhabited by warring gods and competing demons. In the disen­ chanted and rationalized world of the iron cage, reason has become powerless and indifferent to the moral choice of universals and norms of a pluralistic society. Unable to choose among competing values, reason is caught in a relativism which cannot provide any justifica­ tion for either social action or public policy. Under these circum­ stances, science must be value free. The apparent split between ethics and science has been the basis for some criticism that Weber is a positivist who denies science the possibility of introducing values or making judgments about the world. A myriad of fascinating and provocative interpretations suggest that Weber is simply using this approach to reject, not support, positiv­ ism. Weber does offer a comprehensive neo-Kantian theory of value as part of his epistemology but has real difficulties joining it to his method of social inquiry. Reason does have a voice in forming the objects of social analysis and in articulating the issues and problems under scientific investigation. And there is a social critique of mo­ dernity grounded in his theory of rationalization, technical reason, and the iron cage. At the end of the century, Habermas, too, offers an extensive theory of value in his epistemology of cognitive inter­ ests and human emancipation, analysis of the normative founda­ tions of the logic of social science, examination of rationalization and the functional steering of the social system, critique of social reification and the colonization of the lifeworld, and, finally, in his discourse ethics with its goal of an enlightened, democratic society of open dialogue and non-distorted communication. For the past hundred years, German intellectuals have debated the issues of epistemology and methods in the social sciences. They have argued vigorously over the status of theoretical concepts and ideas; they have asked questions about whether there is an objective social reality that is accessible to the human mind and whether so­ cial reality is reflected in our theories or merely constructed by them. Epistemology has been traditionally mixed with issues of ethics and politics. The question then becomes: Is there an empirical, objective reality waiting to be measured and tested, or does reality reflect the investigator’s own interests and values? Are both empirical reality

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

and scientific methods social constructions? Weber himself raises the question of whether the Protestant Reformation was a real his­ torical event or simply a theoretically constructed idea. In the tradi­ tional Enlightenment view, there is an objective reality; concepts are capable of mirroring and reflecting that reality; a pure, objective, and universal truth is possible; and normative reason as ethics and politics has no role in science and thus is incapable of making judg­ ments or evaluations about the objectively given reality. With the* development of neo-Kantian epistemology in the nine­ teenth century, the basis of the discussion begins to change quickly. Issues of objectivity and values in social science start to take inter­ esting and subtle turns. No longer capable of accepting the exist­ ence of pure, empirical facts or the thing-in-itself and rejecting the assumptions of both empiricism and rationalism, philosophers find it necessary to reconstruct the epistemological foundations of soci­ ology from the ground up, with central importance given to the con­ sciousness, values, and interests of the investigator. Objectivity and empirical reality are viewed as constructs of subjectivity as conscious­ ness transforms the manifold of empirical data and reorganizes ob­ servational information. The cultural sciences begin to be separated from the natural sciences as the uniqueness of cultural meaning and the particularity of history take shape outside of nature and its ex­ planatory laws. Debates over the objectivity of experience, differing forms of method, and alternative logics of inquiry assume center stage when consciousness is seen as essential to the formation of the objects of perception in everyday life and concept formation in sci­ ence. Once subjective consciousness is recognized as having a pri­ mary role in concept and theory formation, the issue of values and ethics in science is not far behind. The rich philosophical tradition of German Idealism is blended with an analysis of the logic and methods of social science. Weber is able to place himself strategically within economic theory between representatives of the German Historical School (Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, and Gustav Schmoller) and the Austrian School of economic thought (Carl Menger). And he does this while also turning to the works of the neo-Kantian philosophers Wilhelm Windelband, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert and to those of the Kantian existentialists Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. As consciousness takes on a special epistemological role in the social sciences, Kant’s theory of appearances and phenom-

The Social Construction of Methods

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ena, Schopenhauer’s theory of illusions and the veil of Maya, and Nietzsche’s theory of perspectivism and conceptual fictions figure prominently in Weber’s philosophy of science. At the end of the twentieth century, Habermas accomplishes the same feat as Weber since he, too, finds it necessary to reconstruct the major philosophi­ cal arguments throughout the century in order to ground his own claims to moral and theoretical truths. For Habermas, the nineteenthcentury disputes were between a method of historical understanding and a method of theoretical explanation. The methods used in ex­ plaining economic behavior are different from those used in inter­ preting the historical significance of a meaningful act. Borrowing from Kant and Hegel, Peirce and Dilthey, Gadamer and Apel, Marx and Freud, and Weber and Parsons, he seeks to expand these discus­ sions in order to provide a broader appreciation of the role of social theory. And with these discussions the gap between natural and so­ cial science grows wider; the method and logic of history and phys­ ics have less in common; and the need to rethink the nature of sci­ ence becomes increasingly more important. The first three chapters of this book outline the philosophical de­ bates during the nineteenth century over the nature of historical knowledge and science in neo-Kantian epistemology, Nietzschean existentialism and perspectivism, and the methodological disputes between German and Austrian economists. The last two chapters continue these discussions with the arguments between representa­ tives of critical rationalism, postmodernism, critical hermeneutics, and the Frankfurt School. A common thread in these chapters is the examination of the relationships between concepts and reality, con­ sciousness and experience, subjectivity and objectivity. The central issue throughout is that of the objective validity of sociological cat­ egories. What relationship is there between concepts of the social sciences and empirical reality? I. K. Stephens begins his analysis of neo-Kantian epistemology by returning to the original question posed by David Hume: The problem which Hume raises here is simply that concerning the objective validity of the conceptual order of the mind. If one desires to defend a claim to certainty in knowledge pertaining to “matters of fact,” it is incumbent upon him to show how the mind can impose its concepts upon “matters of fact,” upon the “given in experience,” in such a manner as to guarantee that conceptual necessity will govern the given.1

This statement expresses the crucial issue of the need to deter­ mine the justification or grounding of concepts within the social sci-

6

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

ences and the objective validity of their relation to the social world. It becomes the central focus of nineteenth-century neo-Kantian thought with its constitution theory of truth, emphasis upon the cre­ ative dynamic of the human mind, and integration of empiricism and rationalism. This tradition rejects the epistemological realism (independent objective reality and copy theory of truth), conceptual nominalism, and one-sided naturalism (laws and method of natural science) of positivism and argues for the centrality of a theory of historical value and meaning. It searches for an appropriate method based on the logic and concept formation in the historical and cul­ tural sciences. As Kant had examined the limits and internal struc­ ture of metaphysics and pure reason, the neo-Kantians examine the limits of the categories of historical objectivity and critical reason.2 The first chapter stresses the nature of constructed concepts and values in relation to external reality, their grounding, validity, and justification; the second looks at moral categories in relation to claims to universality and objectivity, and the third deals with the relevance and implications of the first two chapters for the debates within the social sciences about the nature of concept formation and valida­ tion. Anglo-American social scientists have generally accepted the givenness of reality, which science is supposed to mirror through its categories and theories or predict through its hypothetical constructs and explanatory laws. In the case of empiricism and rationalism, the grounding of social science in a privileged access to truth is justified on the basis of an objectivity that is ultimately validated through experience or prediction. Weber, in contrast, is steeped in the com­ plex discussions of a theory of knowledge which calls into question just these underlying assumptions about the relationships between objectivity and subjectivity. With the rise of German Idealism and the later expansion and radicalization of Kantian epistemology and moral philosophy through the neo-Kantians and Nietzsche, these very issues, which once appeared settled, are called into question. The “back to Kant” movement involves a total reconsideration of concept and theory formation in the social sciences and a funda­ mental critique of traditional positivism. Chapter 1 begins by examining the intensifying debates in Ger­ many over the differences between the natural (Naturwissenschaften) and cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and over the recogni­ tion of the growing importance of Immanuel Kant in this national dialogue. Kant’s Critique o f Pure Reason is closely examined, as

The Social Construction of Methods

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well as his rejection of Hume and empiricism, and his theory of phenomena and noumena, perception and experience, and the epis­ temological role of the a priori structures of the human mind and transcendental subjectivity. These epistemological ideas are then considered as they influence Heinrich Rickert’s critique of histori­ cal reason in The Limits o f Concept Formation in Natural Science (1902). There are no empirical facts or preexisting historical evi­ dence to be gathered other than the objects constructed by the con­ sciousness of the investigator. The objectivity of historical reality is a product of conscious subjectivity. Further, the underlying epis­ temologies and methods of the social sciences are scrutinized as philosophy is used to clarify the foundations of sociology and eco­ nomics. Of central importance is an examination of the problem­ atic existence of an objective, external world, the social construc­ tion of objectivity based on cultural significance and meaning (sub­ jectivity), and the complex relationship between mental concepts and historical reality. In Back to Kant, Thomas Wiley describes mid-nineteenth-century German philosophy as “a battlefield strewn with corpses and de­ bris.”3 The speculative idealism and lofty metaphysics of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling had been replaced by the criticisms of the Left Hegelians (Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach), Marx and Engels, Spren Kierkegaard, and Jakob Burckhardt. These, in turn, would be superseded by the materialism and positivism of Karl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner, and Ernst Haeckel and by the neoKantiariism of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer at Marburg and Windelband, Rickert, and Friedrich Lange at the South­ west School. Bom in 1863, Rickert was educated in Berlin, Zurich, and Strassburg. His dissertation, Zur Lehre von der Definition (1888), represents a continuation of the work of Windelband on a critical theory of historical reason and a rejection of Humean positivism in the social sciences. In his later writings he would refer to the preva­ lent and exclusive philosophy of nineteenth-century materialism and positivism as “a paralysis of the historical sense in philosophy” and “a lamentable impoverishment of intellectual life.” 4 Building upon the distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences articulated by Windelband and Dilthey, Rickert transforms Kant’s critique of pure reason into a critique of historical knowledge, an integration of empiricism and rationalism into a cri­ tique of positivism, and a theory of value and meaning into a sociol-

8

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

ogy of culture and understanding. Reality is an unknowable thingin-itself consisting of an infinite manifold and indeterminate diver­ sity of formless sensations and objects; it is inaccessible to the finite mind. Nature and history are products of human consciousness formed by the different methods of the natural and cultural scien­ tists. They have no independent reality outside of human conscious­ ness. Natural science uses general categories to subsume particular occurrences under universal laws, whereas cultural or historical sci­ ence emphasizes the particularity, uniqueness, and meaning of his­ torical events and intentional acts. Objectivity in the latter is deter­ mined by the universal values and interests of the investigator. Chapter 2 continues the Kantian discussion of consciousness and objectivity in the works of Schopenhauer, Lange, and Nietzsche. It is through the works of Schopenhauer and Lange that Nietzsche develops his understanding of Kantian epistemology and moral phi­ losophy. Arthur Schopenhauer’s analysis of Kant is interestingly and imaginatively presented in On the Fourfold Root o f the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) and in the appendix to The World as Will and Representation (1844). The philosophical investigation of suffi­ cient reason is the core of Schopenhauer’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Jena in which he examines Kant’s theory of re­ presentation of sense experience mediated by the a priori structure of consciousness in the form of time, space, and causality. Experi­ ence and objectivity appear to the subject as representations. Even at this early stage in his intellectual development, Schopenhauer makes a radical change in Kantian philosophy by interpreting the thing-in-itself as the cosmic will. In The World as Will and Represen­ tation, Schopenhauer continues to develop his view of the Kantian theory of knowledge and the existential will. Regarding Kant’s Cri­ tique o f Pure Reason, he states, “The Transcendental Aesthetic is a work of such merit that it alone would be sufficient to immortalize the name of Kant.”5 Schopenhauer likens Kant’s characterization of the phenomena of experience to the Hindu doctrine of Maya found in the teachings of the Vedas and the Puranas and to Plato’s theory of the cave in the Republic. Kant’s critique of pure reason and theory of appearances represent the philosophical characterization of the poetic and mythi­ cal experience of the world seen as a distorting dream of the veil of Maya or deceptive illusions of the cave. The existence of an objec­ tive world governed by essential principles of rationality is an illu-

The Social Construction of Methods

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sion. The world is a product of the forms of consciousness that orga­ nize and structure human experience through the representation of the objects in the mind. We know the world only through our per­ ceptions of it; behind them is only an empty void. This idea, in turn, plays an important part in the Kantian foundation of Nietzsche’s theory of the myths, poetry, and philosophy of the ancient Greeks in The Birth of Tragedy. At the University of Bonn, where he taught pedagogy and psy­ chology, Friedrich Lange delivered a series of lectures in 1857 on the history of materialism. These lectures were published in 1866 as The History of Materialism. In this work Lange transforms Kant’s logical and transcendental theory of perception into a theory of psy­ chology and brain physiology as he examines Kant’s critique of the limits of experience, consciousness, and reason, his rejection of materialism and empiricism, and his development of transcendental idealism. Lange begins his analysis of modern philosophy with a discussion of Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic propo­ sitions and the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments. He then moves to a study of Kant’s theory of understanding, objectivity, and knowledge, phenomena and thing-in-itself, the doctrine of time and space, and his theory of causality. He rejects the crude materialism and positivism of Büchner, Moleschott, and Vogt in his articulation of Kant’s thesis on the thing-in-itself. From 1872 until his death in 1875, he lectured at the University of Marburg, attempting to inte­ grate Kantian ethics with issues of social justice and democratic so­ cialism. These lectures would form the basis for a neo-Kantian so­ cialist movement at Marburg headed by Cohen and his students Paul Natorp, Franz Staudinger, Karl Vorländer, Rudolf Stammler, and Kurt Eisner. Schopenhauer’s and Lange’s works on Kant provide Nietzsche with the crucial philosophical foundations for his own nihilist theory of knowledge and morality. Nietzsche must be understood within this context of critical theory and existentialism in order to appreci­ ate his radicalization of the fundamental categories of German Ide­ alism. In the second section of this chapter we explore this interrela­ tionship between Schopenhauer and Lange and the Kantian influ­ ence on Nietzsche’s theory of the subjective constitution of values in his concepts of the will to power and the universal revaluation of all values. It is this Kantian dimension in Nietzsche which makes it impossible for him to validate and ground claims to moral univer-

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

sality and leads to nihilism and moral relativism. As Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason are transformed by Nietzsche into his theories of epistemological perspectivism, moral nihilism, and the will to power, the limits of human reason are manifested in the very nature of science and moral philosophy. Rejecting a privileged ac­ cess to truth in the objectivity of experience and ideas, Nietzsche grounds his scientific and moral universe in the pure subjectivity of consciousness and will. Nietzsche radicalizes Kant’s critiques and then turns them against Kant himself. If Kant introduced the importance of subjectivity and consciousness into the process of knowing, then it is Nietzsche who completely subjectivizes our knowledge of nature and morality. For him, knowledge becomes the representation and perspective of the structures of pure reason and the will. Objectivity is turned into a radical subjectivity. The Newtonian forms of nature and the categori­ cal imperative are viewed as simply moments in the dialectic of chang­ ing consciousness. There is no longer any ground or foundation to our knowledge except the power of the will toward self-determina­ tion. The claims of universality of the categorical imperative and transcendental unity of apperception become moments in an unend­ ing dialectic of reason. With the death of God, humanity loses all bearing and direction other than the continuous drive of its own will and cognition; the universal categories of the understanding become merely historical forms in the evolution of consciousness. Drawing upon Schopenhauer’s view of the world as valueless and absurd, without any essential coherent meaning, Nietzsche argues in The Birth o f Tragedy and Philosophy in the Tragic Age o f the Greeks that German existentialism must be joined with a study of classical Greek tragedy and physics. He accomplishes this by devel­ oping a theory of art in which there are two aesthetic drives in hu­ mans. The Apollonian drive is a reflection of the formal need for order and meaning in human life, supplying the world with aes­ thetic, ethical, and metaphysical ideals that create political order, social meaning, and individual purpose. In his analysis of Greek physics, tragedy, and philosophy, Nietzsche argues that they pro­ vided just such content to fill the void and terror of human exist­ ence. The Dionysian drive represents their creative spirit of intoxi­ cated ecstasy and mystical rapture which brings wisdom about the tragic human condition of pain and suffering, as well as the creative potential in the human spirit. In this context, Rickert’s and Weber’s

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methodological applications of the principle of value relevance take on a new dimension. The social scientist provides a coherence and pattern to the infinite possibilities of human history by creating ideal historical forms from its political, moral, and aesthetic traditions. The theory of value and ideal types may be seen as Weber’s attempt to apply the Apollonian and Dionysian principles to the critique of historical reason and the study of society.6 Chapter 3 investigates the methodological writings of Max Weber in the context of the famous Methodenstreit between the Austrian School of marginal utility analysts and the German Historical School of economics. That is, it examines the methodological dispute within economics over the nature of science, causality, validation, and his­ tory. The debate begins in the early 1880s with an exchange be­ tween Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller. Menger is the founder of the Austrian Marginalist School of economic positivism, which in­ cludes such other European notables as Leon Walras, W. S. Jevons, and Eugen Bohm-Bawerk. In 1883 he publishes his Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, which is critically reviewed by Schmoller in his journal Schmollers Jahrbuch. Menger replies in sixteen polemical letters to a friend that are later published in 1884 in The Error of Historicism in the German Economy. It is in the con­ text of this debate between the two schools of economic thought that Weber develops his own theory of historical sociology and method. Weber’s earliest methodological writings examine the works of the Historical School. In these essays he defines his own position within the debate over methods in the nineteenth century and bor­ rows freely from both schools, weaving his way through their at times abstract and often abstruse discussions. From Menger he em­ phasizes the role of methodological individualism and economic types as theoretical abstractions, whereas from Schmoller he accepts the critique of universal economic laws based on the model of the natural sciences. Thus, from both Schmoller’s economic theory and Rickert’s theory of knowledge, Weber develops a powerful critique of neo-classical economics and positivism in the social sciences. His understanding of empirical laws is informed by Rickert’s notion of the infinite universe and the conceptual construction of reality through historical reason. Both Menger and Schmoller search for economic laws. The de­ bate between them concerns the method and ontology of these laws.

12

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

Menger argues that economic laws reflect the essential and univer­ sal forces of nature and history, whereas Schmoller contends that they reflect only unique causal relationships between particular his­ torical events. They represent the different sides of the positivist debate over the nature of social science—the rationalism, deductive logic, and explanatory economics of Menger’s naturalism and universalism and the empiricism and induction of Schmoller’s histori­ cal research.7 The neo-classical Marginalist School attempts to build universal causal laws and objective validity on the model of both the natural sciences and the egoistic psychology of the classical eco­ nomic theory of Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus. The Historical School draws its inspiration from the German Romantic movement with its stress on the unique individual, as well as on the ethical and histori­ cal. The central question of the debate is whether economics is a nomothetic theoretical science or an idiographic historical science.8 Weber’s essays on the younger members of the Historical School— Roscher and Knies—expand his understanding of the School’s po­ sition and form the basis for his early methodological writings. Weber’s methodological writings and his Wissenschaftslehre make sense only within the context of these general discussions about method. His theory of science reveals the influence of Kant, Rickert, Lange, Nietzsche, and Schmoller on his distinctive and creative for­ mulation of the conditions for the possibility of the social sciences. Through his work on objectivity and meaning, causality and sci­ ence, significance and history, as well as through his integration of historical and theoretical science and value relevance and value free­ dom, he articulates the limits of historical reason. He develops a non-positivist theory of historical causality and objective possibility that begins with neo-Kantian assumptions about a constitution theory of truth and objectivity. Historical categories do not reflect social reality, which is an infinitely complex manifold of formless, mean­ ingless, and unknowable occurrences. Rather, these categories re­ construct the objectivity of the past in terms of the cultural signifi­ cance and perspectives relevant to the present. From the infinite flow of reality, they create the concrete phenomena and individual events worth examining by science (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft). Therefore, objectivity is always a construct of subjectivity in Weber’s thought. His earliest methodological writings coincide with his historical work on the Protestant Reformation and its relation to the conscious­ ness and values of the capitalist social order. Weber attempts to pass

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between two different philosophical views of the capability of rea­ son. The first is informed by Kant’s critique of pure and practical reason, Dilthey’s distinction between a sociology of explanation and a sociology of understanding, Simmel’s epistemology of historical forms, and Rickert’s critique of objectivity and cultural reason. From the perspective of early German sociology, the categories of social inquiry and objectivity are dynamically formed and constructed by the investigator through the application of value relevance, ideal types, and adequate causation. The second view upon which Weber leans is that of Nietzsche’s perspectivism and relativism. Reason has be­ come indifferent to cultural values, moral norms, and political com­ mitment, as well as silent to the possibilities of social critique. Weber articulates this conflict through his use of the terms “value relevance” (Wertbeziehung) and “value freedom” (Wertfreiheit). It is this very tension between a philosophy of science based on Kantian constructionalism and Nietzschean nihilism that frames his under­ standing of the methodological debate (Methodenstreit) between the science of the Austrian and the German schools of economics. We­ ber, unfortunately, never clarifies these different approaches; never combines them into a coherent metatheory; and never develops the methodological implications of his neo-Kantian theory of value for the possibilities of social critique. However, in spite of these serious limitations, Weber’s critique of positivism is quite clear. Borrowing from neo-Kantian philosophy of social science and theory of his­ tory, Nietzschean perspectivism and existentialism, and the Histori­ cal School of German economics; rejecting the naturalism and real­ ism of natural science; rejecting the determinism and universal laws of social explanation of both Marxism and neo-classical economics; defining history in terms of the unique and particular event and its intentional and cultural significance; theorizing about concept for­ mation in terms of finite objectivity, value relevance, ideal types, and historical causality, Weber ultimately concludes with a theory of value freedom as a freedom from the values of positivism and meta­ physics of rationalization. But as he moves from his early methodological works of 1903-09 to his later period following 1913, Weber’s methodological writings lose their clarity, direction, and philosophical foundations. He leaves behind the neo-Kantianism of Rickert and the philosophy of the Historical School as his methodological categories become more static and rigid and less applicable to the issues of historical sociol-

14

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

ogy. In the later writings of the Wissenschaftslehre, he approaches the social sciences in terms of instrumental rationality, natural cau­ sality, and a technical reconstruction of historical relationships. In three essays, “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” and “Basic Sociological Terms,” Weber develops a method of interpre­ tive explanation in which causal historical relations are explained in terms of technological rationality (Zweckrationalitat), predictive behavior, and an apparent positivist methodology. He never philo­ sophically justifies the transformation from his earlier neo-Kantian approach, as a sociology of cultural and historical understanding, to his later one. The tensions between an interpretive science of sub­ jective meaning, causal adequacy, objective possibility, and ideal types are never reconciled with an explanatory science of statistical probabilities, nomological laws, heuristic hypotheses, and empirical verification. And this tension reflects deeper differences between Weber’s epistemology and methodology, the former steeped in Kantian philosophy and the latter in more positivistic terminology. Weber provides an exciting juxtapositioning of empiricism, ratio­ nalism, and postmodernism. However, the attempted synthesis of elements of the cultural and natural sciences is never fully articu­ lated or really achieved. Years later, Habermas, too, will attempt just such an integration. But his justification rests neither upon episte­ mology nor upon methodology. Rather, he sees it as a necessary result of the dialectic of history and the structures of the social sys­ tem. That is, the methodological synthesis results from broader so­ ciological factors which demand new theories of explanation and interpretation of complex social organizations and historical pro­ cesses. Habermas’s metatheoretical reflections on the philosophy of social science evolve out of his critical social theory. In the final section of this chapter, Weber’s historical sociology is examined as a sociology of the institutional and cultural origins of rationalization and capitalism, from his early work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit o f Capitalism (1905), to his later writings and lectures, The Religion of China (1916), General Economic History (1919-20), his introduction to the Religionssoziologie (1920), and Economy and Society (1921). He is aware of the criticisms of his major thesis on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism and responds quickly in his later Religionssoziologie and historical soci­ ology, which stress a more comprehensive picture of general eco-

The Social Construction of Methods

15

nomic history and the structural prerequisites for capitalism.9 He details the historical and structural preconditions for a capitalist po­ litical economy in his analysis of the medieval Church, feudal politi­ cal order, formal rational law, and medieval city, the rise of the bu­ reaucratic nation-state in the sixteenth century, and the internal dy­ namic of a free market economy. But he never rethinks his method­ ological conclusions to reflect his historical and structuralist writ­ ings, nor does he offer a more comprehensive philosophy of sci­ ence that would explain their methodological role in his expanded social theory. Chapter 4 begins the second part of this work with an investiga­ tion into the methodological disputes as they develop in the twenti­ eth century by examining the debate between the critical rationalism of Karl Popper and Hans Albert and the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. Known as the Positivismusstreit (posi­ tivist dispute) in German sociology, it is built upon the earlier Methodenstreit of Menger and Schmoller, the distinction between the natural and cultural sciences within the Southwest School of neoKantianism, and Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre. In 1961 a conference is held in Tübingen by the German Sociological Association in which the methodological dispute is continued. Popper begins the debate with his articulation of twenty-seven theses, which summarize his general criticism of the logical positivism of the Vienna School.10 Popper’s criticism of traditional positivism is a powerful attack on the empiricism, scientific objectivity, and realism that underlie it. Rejecting the possibility of verification of scientific theories through observation, empirical confirmation, or statistical probability, Pop­ per turns to a theory that science is a dialectic between knowledge and ignorance played out within the scientific community. The only form of confirmation that Popper allows is the temporary satisfac­ tion that the scientific explanations and predictions of a theory have not been empirically disproved or falsified. Popper’s critique of em­ piricism and return to methodological individualism, a nomothetic sociology, and causal explanations give the initial impression of a return to Kant and Weber. Adorno responds by arguing that Popper is offering a disguised form of positivism and realism, which only reifies and hypostatizes the objectively given reality while failing to recognize how it is his­ torically and hermeneutically pre-formed by the totality of social and structural relationships of modem capitalist society. That is, facts

16

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

resulting from statistical analysis and opinion surveys are already socially pre-structured by the culture, institutions, and structures of power within society. To reduce science to a measurement of the objectively given is to reproduce unconsciously the contradictory values and structures in a non-reflective and non-critical way. In the face of the alienation and exploitation of modernity, Adorno accepts Marx’s labor theory of value and immanent critique at the same time as he rejects the theory of objectivity and the silence of reason in Popper. Methodology cannot reflect the primacy of philosophical discourse and scientific inquiry but must respond to the totality and complexity of the social reality, that is, its structures and contradic­ tions; methodology must be adequate to the problems of reality and not the interests of science; and it cannot remain at the level of im­ mediate appearances but must reflect underlying ideologies and so­ cial relations. Otherwise, it simply imposes its conceptual forms on that reality and abandons the researcher, as a “registering mecha­ nism,” to the power relations of society. When this happens science becomes a silent accomplice in the rational administration and tech­ nical control of the modern bureaucratic society. In the middle of the twentieth century, critical theorists of the Frank­ furt School examine the rise of Naziism, anti-Semitism, the Holo­ caust, and the rationalization of society. In this context the issue of values and social science becomes even more important. Max Horkheimer’s work, Eclipse o f Reason, frames an aspect of these discussions when he articulates the dissolution of the possibility of moral condemnation in the face of the rationalization of reason and death in modern technological society. What appears as neutral, objective rationality is only a form of reason that is no longer ca­ pable of making normative judgments about society, human action, or social justice. “The great speculative questions of truth and jus­ tice, of freedom and happiness, have to find a home somewhere; and if an aridly technical philosophy, or a dreary positivist sociol­ ogy, are no hospitable media for such explorations, then they will be displaced onto a criticism which is simply not intellectually equipped to take this strain.”11 Many German social theorists sought answers to the rationalization and suppression of reason. Weber had articu­ lated the dilemma and tragedy of modernity; the rest of the twentieth century fought to find solutions to the instrumental rationality of the iron cage in which humans become passive bystanders to their own history and crimes.

The Social Construction of Methods

17

Habermas and Albert continue this debate in their argument over the nature and use of the concept of “social totality.” Habermas con­ tends that it is an essential category of sociological inquiry since it investigates society as a total system and integrated structure. He wishes to trace methodologically the contours of this social totality in the form of an integration of structuralism (history and social in­ stitutions) and hermeneutics (cultural lifeworld). Habermas’s approach returns to the Weberian problem of the integration of the methods of explanation and understanding in a dialectical theory of society. Albert responds by arguing that this is just another form of Marxist mysticism and metaphysics, without proper grounding in scientific method and critical inquiry. In an unusual twist of argument, he criti­ cizes Habermas for turning to a totalitarian politics and methodologi­ cal positivism. These exciting methodological disputes continue throughout the 1960s in the halls of the German universities and sociological associations and conferences. Chapter 5 investigates the competing theories of social science and their synthesis in the work of Habermas. From his earliest writ­ ings, Theory and Practice (1963), Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), and On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1970), to his later magnum opus, The Theory o f Communicative Action (1981), Habermas places himself in the thick of these disputes in his attempt to unravel analytically the differences between the competing theo­ ries and methodologies. More remarkable, however, is his effort to integrate them into a comprehensive philosophy of social science that reflects the methodological priorities of his own social theory. By continuing Adorno’s critique of the empirical-analytic method, he brings to the surface its hidden methodological assumptions, so­ cial values, and technical interests. He is able to connect science to human interests and political ideology as it provides the foundation for the cultural legitimation and political acceptance of the modem interventionist state. Habermas’s work is also a response to the lim­ its of science articulated by Quine and Kuhn and the rejection of the Enlightenment project by Rorty. He reconstructs a phenomenologi­ cal history of classical social thought in order to reveal the forms and structures of rationality underlying modernity. His theory of sci­ ence is a response to the postmodernist critique of epistemology and foundationalism. Habermas’s methodological reflections are reconstructed from his theory of society as a complex interaction of overlapping structures

18

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

and social subsystems: economy, polity, social institutions (social norms), and culture (values and socialization). For a modem society to adapt to its environment, attain its goals, maintain its community, and reproduce its cultural patterns, it must accomplish four basic structural functions, what Parsons called the AGIL schema of adap­ tation, goal attainment, integration, and pattern maintenance. With the rationalization of modernity, the need for “social integration”— that is, the development of cultural traditions, social institutions, and personality—is supplanted and displaced by the need for “system integration.” This second form of integration is expressed as a con­ tinuing expansion of the state’s role in capital accumulation, politi­ cal legitimation, and limiting of the spread of social pathologies. By these means the market economy is protected against class conflicts and social disruptions; stabilized against system disequilibrium and economic crises; and immunized against possible social criticism and political unrest. According to Habermas, these structural changes result in the development of a pathological, narcissistic personality and decentered self, a consumer culture and mass society, and the repression of social and individual needs. Society’s functional requirements for cognitive development and maturation, cultural expression, and dynamic social institutions are replaced by the logic of purposive-rational action with its focus on power and money. The new role of the modem state is to create the conditions for economic development and stability by providing the technical knowledge for administrative control and efficient social organization. One way to accomplish this is to replace destabilizing demands for justice, equality, and freedom with the non-threatening values of individual liberties, market freedoms, and system integra­ tion. This political mechanism of drive suppression and substitute gratification through material hedonism, market consumerism, and political decisionism has created a political arena in which adapta­ tion and conformity to the social system are paramount. The indi­ vidual personality, culture, and social institutions are plundered in order to insure the stability and growth of the capitalist economy. Habermas refers to this process as the rationalization of communi­ cative action and the colonization of the lifeworld. From his reflection on this process of social rationalization and reification, Habermas concludes that access to distorted cultural meaning and repressed human needs requires more sophisticated methods of sociological analysis—the depth hermeneutics of psy-

The Social Construction of Methods

19

choanalysis and a critique of ideology. Like Weber, he summarizes and expands upon the decades of methodological and epistemo­ logical debates in the social sciences. And as in the case of Weber, the richness, subtlety, and excitement of these debates reach higher levels of articulation in his work. Weber attempts to make sense of the discussions within economics and philosophy over the distinc­ tion between the methods of nature and history, explanation and understanding; he develops an interpretive sociology of subjective meaning which reconstructs meaning on the basis of individual in­ tentions and cultural significance. Habermas continues Weber’s ap­ proach beyond a critical hermeneutics to a functionalist analysis of power, repression, and ideology. For him, the real meaning of indi­ vidual action lies beneath surface motivations and subjective inten­ tions in the causal explanation of reified social institutions, repressed human needs, and distorted political ideals of the social unconscious. Weber had serious difficulties making the link between the methods of explanation and understanding, whereas Habermas is better able to integrate the two because he recognizes that the connections be­ tween them lie in the structures of rationalization and alienation. Habermas applies the methods of psychoanalysis and Marxist cri­ tique since “the relations of power [are] surreptitiously incorporated in the symbolic structures of the systems of speech and action.”12 He searches for a method of objective meaning which examines “the causal context in which intentions are entangled.”13 For this he relies on the explanatory and causal methods of functionalism found in Marx, Freud, and Parsons. The dangers inherent in the applica­ tion of the logic and method of the natural sciences to a study of society include the loss of understanding of historically unique events and the cultural and individual meaning of social action. But the dangers also include the reification and quantification of social rela­ tions—turning historical individuals and social structures into examples of natural laws. Habermas recognizes, however, that the objectification and fetishism of society are already accomplished historical phenom­ ena, and, therefore, methodological aspects of the natural sciences are necessary in order to explain them. Nomological laws reflect the de­ velopment of a mechanistic and deterministic society. They are not imposed upon society as external covering laws but are historical laws manifesting concrete forms of alienated social organization and repressed social consciousness.14 They have been stripped of their underlying metaphysics of naturalism and scientism.

20

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

Backing into these metatheoretical questions by means of a ratio­ nal reconstruction, Habermas outlines the epistemological and meth­ odological issues on the basis of his theory of rationality in advanced industrial society. Methodological concerns are tied to the process of structural rationalization and to the development of the institu­ tions of advanced capitalist society. The logic of inquiry and method of investigation are connected to an examination of the transforma­ tion of monopoly capital and the existence of social pathologies, such as problems of capital accumulation, the crisis of political le­ gitimation and public authority, the loss of cultural traditions and repressed social ideals, psychological malformation within the nar­ cissistic personality, and disruptions of community institutions and relationships. Thus, methodology flows from social theory and em­ pirical research. Sociology creates the framework within which phi­ losophy clarifies its methods—not the other way around. It provides us with the tools for examining a historical analysis of the structures of modernity, their functions in maintaining system stability and cri­ sis avoidance, the replacement of social integration by system inte­ gration, the formation of a distorted self in consumer society, the repression of reflective thought by the displacement of critical sym­ bols and ideas, and a critique of ideology and false consciousness. However, the substantive content and form of rationality of each type of inquiry require that each area have its own methodology, logic of inquiry, and concept formation. And it is for these very rea­ sons that Habermas phenomenologically reconstructs the history of classical sociology in order to ground his theory of rationality and critique of modernity. For him, critical science is able to integrate and triangulate the social methods related to issues of culture, work, and the structures of domination and power.15 In order to accom­ plish this, the investigator must delve into the depth structures of the domination of nature and society. From his earliest writings on knowledge and human interests, the logic of social science, the ideal speech situation, and an ethics of discourse to his later ideas on communicative action and discursive rationality, Habermas gives voice to a critical reason that continues to combine empirical and historical research with a search for social justice, economic and political freedom, and social equality. Sci­ ence cannot immunize itself from broader social values; it cannot isolate itself through a false neutrality and myth of objectivity; and it cannot simply reproduce the given structures of power and con-

The Social Construction of Methods

21

sciousness without a self-reflective and self-critical questioning of its role in society. Science must be reintegrated with ethics and poli­ tics as reason transcends the narrow limits of positivism that neither questions itself nor the social structures that gave birth to it. The Enlightenment view of objectivity and science does not per­ mit reason to voice ethical and political views but forces the scientist to remain silent in the face of the institutions and values of moder­ nity. Thus, social science becomes complicit in the acceptance of alienation, rationalization, and distorted consciousness. Asserting epistemological and metaphysical claims about the nature of reality and our access to it, reason is reduced to reflecting immediately given appearances and to making decisions which only reinforce the ad­ ministrative and technical control over nature and society. But with Weber and Habermas, German social theory is able to make claims about the normative foundations of science in value relevance and human interests, the meaning and significance of culture, and the implications of the structural imperatives and social reification of a rationalized society. Whether society is characterized in terms of an iron cage or distorted communication and repressed personality de­ velopment, science is able to make ethical and political judgments about the nature of modernity. Values now become part of the con­ cept formation, logic of inquiry, and methodology of the social sci­ ences. With this broadening of our understanding of society, there is an expansion of the issues engaged by social science; with this deep­ ening of our knowledge of the structures and functions of distorted rationality, there is a corresponding need to expand the sociological methods in order to gain access to these new types of social repres­ sion. While he rejects the underlying epistemology of positivism and scientism, Habermas views critical science as now incorporat­ ing a wider range of sociological methods and forms of rationality, which include questions of culture and understanding of interpre­ tive science, the structuralism, institutions, and history of historical science, the functionalism and causal determinism of explanatory science, and the depth hermeneutics and critique of ideology of emancipatory science. To summarize, the seven main areas of this investigation into nine­ teenth- and twentieth-century methodological disputes in German sociology and philosophy of social science include the examination of the following: (1) the role of values and ethics in scientific in­ quiry; (2) connection between ethics and objectivity; (3) centrality

22

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

of consciousness (theory) in the formation of the objects of experi­ ence and the objectivity of science; (4) critique of positivism and the silence of practical reason; (5) attempted integration of the method of understanding (cultural and historical interpretation) and the method of explanation (causality and hypothetical laws) in Weber and Habermas; (6) relationships and tensions between epistemol­ ogy and method; and (7) analysis of objectivity after postmodernism. Readers unfamiliar with the technical language of Kantian philoso­ phy may wish to start with chapter 3 on Max Weber and then return to the first chapter on Kant and Rickert and the second on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

I. K. Stephens, “Cassirer’s Doctrine of the A Priori,” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1973), p. 151. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 25, and Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1956), p. 23. Thomas Wiley, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860-1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1978), p. 24. Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences, ed. and trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 13 and 17, respectively, and Die Grenzen

der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung: Eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 5th

5.

6.

7.

8.

edition, 1929), pp. 2 and 7, and (Tübingen: Mohr Verlag, 1st edition, 1902), pp. 3 and 8, respectively. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” in The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p. 417, and “Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie,” in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1, in Arthur Schopenhauer Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1949), p. 494. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 2: Dürkheim, Pareto, and Weber, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1970), pp. 231-33, and Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Cul­ ture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 77. Thomas Burger describes the dispute in Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Forma­ tion: History, Laws, and Ideal Types (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1976) as that between two different forms of theoretical and historical positivism. “For both of them, scientific knowledge constituted a mental picture of the empirical phenomena in question; it was conceived as a replica of the object in the mind (p. 141). The debate was over the nature of positivism and the “correct methods of abstraction.” Gordon Marshall, In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism: An Essay on Max Weber ’s Protestant Ethic Thesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 33.

The Social Construction of Methods 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

23

Marshall, In S e a rc h o f the S p ir it o f C a p ita lism , p. 58. A. J. Ayer, L o g ic a l P o sitiv ism (New York: The Free Press, 1959). Terry Eagleton, The C risis o f C o n te m p o ra ry C u ltu re (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 16. Jürgen Habermas, T h eory a n d P r a c tic e , trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 12, and T h eo rie u n d P ra x is (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), p. 19. Jürgen Habermas, O n th e L o g ic o f the S o c ia l S c ie n c e s , trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry Stark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 36, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S ozialw issen sch aften : M aterialien (Frankfort am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), p. 116. Floyd Matson, The B roken Im age: M a n , S c ien ce a n d S o c ie ty (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 11-15 and David Held, In tro d u ctio n to C r itic a l T h eory: H o rk h e im e r to H a b e r m a s (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1980), pp. 166-74. For further analysis of the need for a multi-paradigmatic sociology, see W. Lawrence Neuman, S o c ia l R esearch M eth ods: Q u a lita tive a n d Q u a n tita tive A p p ro a ch es (Bos­ ton: Allyn & Bacon, 1997) and Robert Alford, The C ra ft o f In qu iry: T h eo ries , M eth o d s, E v id e n c e (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Part 1 Methodological Disputes in the Nineteenth Century: Neo-Kantianism, Existentialism, and the German Historical School

1 Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity: Kant and Rickert Around the turn of the twentieth century the neo-Kantian move­ ment was taking hold in universities in the southwest comer of Ger­ many (Strassburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg) and at the University of Marburg. In Marburg, the neo-Kantians were working in the area of the philosophy and logic of science. Important work was being done by Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Franz Staudinger, Rudolf Stammler, and Karl Vorländer to integrate the moral phi­ losophy of Immanuel Kant with the political theory of Karl Marx. Kant could provide Marx with a deeper appreciation of the moral ideals of social development. The neo-Kantians believed that the full expression of practical reason and the categorical imperative occurred only within a socialist community. Only in socialism do you get the full empowerment of the individual through the realiza­ tion of a kingdom of ends and human emancipation.1 The South­ west or Baden School of neo-Kantian thought focused its atten­ tion on issues of epistemology and methodology within the so­ cial sciences. Its members included Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Richard Kroner, and Max Weber. It was Kant’s critique of pure and practical reason that held these individuals together and provided the inspiration for their expansion of Kantian philoso­ phy into social theory and methodology of the social sciences. This chapter will focus on the contributions of the Southwest School to the methodological dispute (Methodenstreit) in nineteenth-century Germany.

27

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

Kant’s Theory of Knowledge and the Critique of Reason The key concepts and philosophical framework that ground twen­ tieth-century discussions on the logic and method of history are pro­ vided by Kant’s major work, Critique o f Pure Reason (1781).2 To appreciate fully the writings of Rickert and Weber, we must first examine in detail Kant’s epistemology and critical method. It was David Hume, according to Kant, who awoke him from his famous “dogmatic slumber.”3 Having rejected the metaphysics and episte­ mology of Cartesian rationalism, Hume contended that all knowl­ edge and ideas must ultimately be reducible to sense impressions in order to be true. In his articulate defense of empiricism, he also in­ cluded a nominalist rejection of universals, a separation of values and facts, a copy theory of truth, a correspondence between rational concepts and empirical reality, a theory of conceptual realism and metaphysical objectivity, and a defense of the epistemological pas­ sivity of the mind and the moral indifference of reason. The issue begins very simply as the uncovering of the relationship between the world of sense impressions and the concepts we have about na­ ture. Hume argued for a direct relationship between the external world and our ideas, based on the former being reflected in the latter. This ocular metaphor became the foundation for modem empiricism, and any move beyond the world of perception and sensibility under­ mined the truth claims and validity of our ideas about it. The world of metaphysics and rationalism lay in wait upon the unsuspecting mind to ensnare reason in unreflective superstition, religious fears, and popular prejudice.4 The beginning and end of all knowledge rested in the empirical and our ability to reflect that world in con­ sciousness. Reason was passive and indifferent to the impressions imprinted on the mind; it had no other role than simply to reflect what was offered to it. Hume rejected Descartes’s notion that truth consisted of mathematics and innate ideas, since, for him, experi­ ence alone could be the arbiter of all valid forms of knowledge. Kant accepts Hume’s argument that all knowledge begins with experience, but moves beyond him in maintaining that it is not lim­ ited to the senses. He also accepts Hume’s beliefs that science is based on universal and necessary connections of causality between the objects of experience and that neither rationalism nor empiri­ cism, neither traditional logic nor experience were philosophically able to confirm or ground these relationships. According to Hume’s

Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity

29

critique of traditional foundationalism in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), rationalism is incapable of determin­ ing in an a priori fashion the underlying causes or effects of an ac­ tion simply by reflecting upon them. No amount of reflection on the movement of a billiard ball will determine a priori which direction it will go after impact with other balls. Thus causal connections can­ not be established through the logical analysis of action itself. Ex­ amining the concept of a billiard ball does not aid us in deducing its effects from the movement of a billiard ball. Reason is incapable of discovering the laws of cause and effect in the concept of the ob­ jects themselves. Empiricism, on the other hand, is caught in a vicious logical circle since it can only justify the relationships of continuity between the past and the future based on the presuppositions of inductive logic, which is the very thing it wishes to justify in the first place. Thus the proposition, “The sun will rise tomorrow,” would be true only if acquired experience and induction are assumed to be true from the start. But no amount of empirical evidence can justify this matter of fact statement from experience itself. Science grounded in experi­ ence and inductive logic falls prey to basing one’s argument on the very thing one is attempting to validate. To justify the inductive rea­ soning of natural science on the conformity of the future to the present is to assume the validity of induction in order to prove its logical validity.5 Hume is forced to retreat to the assumption of a subjective necessity and general utility—custom or habit—in order to explain these inferences from experience. The psychological predisposition to think in terms of necessary connections, continuity and resem­ blance of occurrences, and customary associations forms the under­ lying justification of natural science. According to Kant, this failure of Hume’s mental geography to transcend the immediacy of experi­ ence leads to a “censorship of reason.” “This censorship must cer­ tainly lead to doubt regarding all transcendent employment of principles....For while subjecting to censorship certain principles of the understanding, he makes no attempt to assess the understanding itself, in respect of all its powers...”6 It leads to a skeptical and indif­ ferent reason which rejects all a priori propositions and produces a contingent and empirical foundation without reason, that is, without universality and necessity. Reason turns into an illusion of meta­ physical thinking. This explains Kant’s rejection of Hume’s skepti­ cism and turn toward a critique of pure reason.

30

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

Kant starts his own transcendental theory of knowledge by be­ ginning with Hume’s discussion of impressions and by accepting his skepticism about the difficulties of epistemological justifications. In response to both Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism, he formulates a new method of epistemological analysis called Kritik to reestablish the conditions for the possibility of knowledge—the foundations of objectivity, experience, and science. He takes it upon himself to deconstruct Hume’s theory of impressions in order to reconstruct transcendentally and logically the universal and necessary, that is, the a priori foundations of experience and knowledge. By examining the sources of knowledge, he seeks access to the formation of the objects of experience and, in turn, to the objective validity of concepts. By analyzing and unpacking the prior conditions of knowledge, he views the foundations of ex­ perience no longer in the subjective consciousness reflecting on innate ideas or in the sensible world impressing itself on a recep­ tive mind. Rather, the Copernican revolution in philosophy oc­ curs when Kant integrates subjectivity and objectivity, the knower and the known, in one comprehensive view of epistemology. And it is this one insight that will have time-resounding effects on Ger­ man and American social theory, especially on the theories of his­ torical knowledge and experience found in the writings of Weber and Habermas. The phenomenal world of appearances (Erscheinungen) is cre­ ated by the knower who is never able to see the real world as it truly is in itself beyond the categories of the mind. Kant privileges neither ideas nor impressions, but builds a theory of knowledge that em­ phasizes how the impressions are formed through the filtering process of the human mind. And the method of critique unpacks our faculty of knowledge in order to determine the transcendental na­ ture of our concepts. Kant turns Hume’s criticisms of metaphysics against both rationalism and empiricism as being one-sided and nar­ row formulations of epistemology. Is the mind a reflecting mirror that casts back the original image as the empiricists would argue, or is the mind an autonomous agent which examines its own innate ideas as the rationalists contend? Is knowledge independent of ex­ perience, or is it a reproduction of that experience? Kant rejects the dogmatism and metaphysics of both positions as inadequate to an understanding of objectivity and experience, since both claim to have an independent source of knowledge in either the senses or the mind.

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However, he does incorporate important aspects of each into his own method of transcendental or subjective idealism. Kant formulates his critical theory of knowledge as the system­ atic inquiry into the faculty of human reason in order to determine the limits of the application of its concepts. By defining the limits of concept formation he hopes to uncover the relationships between experience and knowledge, reason and metaphysics. In this way he proposes to lay the foundations and justifications for Newtonian physics. The critical method examines the sources and determinate limits of the use of mental principles or categories in the formation of the objects of experience. It reveals the a priori principles and structure of the mind in the process of acquiring these objects. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, “It [critique] is a treatise on the method, not a system of the science itself. But at the same time it marks out the whole plan of the science, both as regards its limits and as regards its entire internal structure.”7 Kant transforms the whole epistemological landscape of objec­ tivity (external world of experience) and subjectivity (conscious­ ness). There is no longer an autonomous physical world indifferent to the principles of reason. This has been replaced by a continuous interaction and forming of phenomenal experience through the con­ cepts of the mind. We know only an objectivity as it subjectively appears to us. By replacing a correspondence theory of truth with a constitution theory, Kant argues that a universal consciousness is actively engaged in the creation of the very objects of experience. He also shows how the universal and necessary forms of causality and other principles of reason are the result of the a priori concepts of the understanding. They are not qualities or relationships existing between the objects themselves, nor are they the result of accumu­ lated psychological habit. The creation of objectivity, the structure of subjectivity, the relationship between concepts and reality, and the objective validity and applicability of rational concepts are all part of the elaborate Kantian metatheoretical foundations of both experience and science. The limits to the a priori concepts of the mind lie in experience itself. Kant examines the intimate relationship between the faculty of the mind that acquires the un-formed and disconnected raw mate­ rial of intuition, which he calls the “manifold of intuition” and the formal principles of consciousness that organize this material into a

32

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

coherent experience of objectivity. There is an appearance of “some­ thing” here and now through the senses and feelings of perception (Anschauung). The categories of the understanding provide the or­ ganizing principle that shapes the information provided by the senses through universal and necessary concepts that exist in the mind prior to experience. The central issue for Kant is an examination of these a priori preconditions for the formation of objectivity. In part one of Kant’s critical theory, in the section entitled “Transcendental Aes­ thetic,” he details the importance of the categories or pure intuitions of time and space for the act of perception, and in part two, on the “Transcendental Analytic” and “Deduction,” he outlines the issues of the concepts of the understanding and experience, appearances and thing-in-itself, and consciousness and reality. Knowledge occurs not when the mind conforms to the objects of experience as in conceptual realism. As Copernicus revolutionized the world by claiming that the earth was no longer the center of the universe, Kant transforms epistemology when he writes that “ob­ jects must conform to our knowledge.”8 The phenomenal world re­ volves around us, conforms to the structures of our mind, and re­ flects the form of our concepts. Neither sensations (Empfindungen) nor innate ideas were to be privileged in his new system. Reason was not to remain indifferent to objectivity, nor was it to act in dog­ matic obedience to concepts. Concepts would no longer reproduce empirical reality or express its inner essence. With this new way of looking at the world, experience must conform to the a priori con­ structions of the mind and the faculty of the understanding. With Kant, human reason or subjectivity would play a central and vital role in the creation of the objects of experience and knowledge. “For experience is itself a species of knowledge which involves un­ derstanding; and understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me, and therefore as being a priori. They find expression in a priori concepts to which all objects of experience necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.”9 The result would be Kant’s own revolution in a phi­ losophy of knowledge which would provide the foundation for the later neo-Kantian schools of thought in Germany. The break with Hume’s theory of impressions and the objects of knowledge and the turn toward a concentration on the mode of know­ ing is Kant’s contribution to a transcendental critique of the a priori structure of reason. The representation of the appearances is formed

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through the categories of substance, force, divisibility, etc., which give objects an appearance of permanence, unity, and order. The thing-in-itself, on the other hand, is a chaotic, meaningless, and irra­ tional world without concepts and language to give it any semblance of being or purpose.10 The concepts and propositions of mathemat­ ics and physics are offered as examples of a priori reasoning. State­ ments such as 7 + 5 = 12, the law of the conservation of mass, and Newton’s third law of action are presented as a priori judgments. Also offered as a justification for a priori statements is the logic of experience and science. Since universal certainty and necessary prin­ ciples cannot be derived from experience itself as Hume had ar­ gued, they must exist prior to it in the mind. For Kant, there must be a priori principles, which provide the foundation for knowledge and judgment outside of the contingent and particular world of sensa­ tion. Only this could explain the possibility of Newtonian physics. This, in turn, leads to a transcendental philosophy, with its critical method outlining these a priori principles of pure reason that make objectivity and science possible. Though sometimes giving the im­ pression that the understanding is a separate function of the mind that becomes involved only in creating judgments and thoughts about the relations of objects, Kant is more consistent when arguing that the spatial and temporal forms of intuition, as well as the categories of the mind (causality, substance, possibility, etc.) are both part of the process of forming the objects of perception and experience. Consciousness or subjectivity is directly involved in the process of creating objectivity and judgments of thought. Kantian Revolution in Time and Space: The Transcendental Aesthetic The Critique of Pure Reason begins with the Transcendental Aes­ thetic and the recognition that all knowledge is derived from two sources: sensibility and understanding. The initial phase of experi­ ence (Etfahrung) in pure sensibility provides the receptivity for re­ ceiving empirical intuitions or representations (Vorstellungen), but these are already preformed by the categories of time and space. Kant calls them the “a priori sensibility” or “forms of sensibility.” Kant distinguishes between the formal and substantive properties of sensibility. Its content is made up of the “manifold of intuition,” whereas the formal characteristics of intuition are constituted by the a priori principles of the mind. The formal principles underlying

34

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

sensibility are time and space. The mind is so constructed that, when intuitions are given, there is a corresponding inner and outer sense that frames the immediate representation of the world of perception in time and space. This means that in intuition we frame all objects as outside us in relation to other things and within a determinate flow of temporal moments. Time and space are not real in them­ selves, they do not exist in objects, and they are not characteristics of the thing-in-itself. They are a reflection of the subjective forms and a priori conditions of the appearances which determine and de­ fine the way the world is directly perceived in intuition (impres­ sions). The representation of space as extension, shape, and dis­ tance is not an empirical concept and cannot be derived from the appearances. Space is an a priori representation that accompanies all our intuitions of the world. There can be no such things as ob­ jects of intuition without time and space. The subjective constitution of the mind provides the formal prin­ ciples within which objects are perceived. And it is this which makes a priori knowledge possible in geometry and mathematics. We ar­ rive at a transcendental understanding of it by reflecting on the pre­ suppositions of objectivity, since without it intuition (sensation) would be impossible.11 This critical method establishes the objec­ tive validity of the categories of space and time by abstracting from representations and discovering what remains as conditions supplied by consciousness itself. Time and space are the forms, and the mani­ fold of intuition or sensation is the content by which the objects of perception are produced. “Since, however, in the relation of the given object to the subject, such properties depend upon the mode of intu­ ition of the subject, this object as appearance, is to be distinguished from itself as object in itselfT12 The two origins of knowledge in sensibility and understanding have a common, but unknown source. “Through the former, objects are given to us; through the latter, they are thought.”13 This sentence is one of the most difficult and challenging to unravel in Kant’s work. Succinctly, the issue is the origin and nature of objectivity. What is the difference between objects of perception (intuition) and objects of experience (sensuous knowledge), and how are they formed? We will see in the next chapter that Schopenhauer struggles with this same epistemological question. Objectivity is formed in subjectiv­ ity. But are the objects formed in intuition and then collected by the understanding in thought and judgment, or are the objects formed

Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity

35

through the forms of intuition and the concepts of the understanding working together? Passages may be quoted to justify either posi­ tion.14 Just as Kant distinguishes between two sources of knowl­ edge, he also refers to both objects of intuition as perception and objects of experience as knowledge. The issue may be resolved if we appreciate that the transcendental aesthetic and analytic are not separate psychological moments in time, but represent logical and analytic distinctions about the necessary and universal preconditions for knowledge determined through philosophical abstraction. Though presented as discrete elements in knowing and forming separate sec­ tions of the Critique of Pure Reason, they are coterminous and spon­ taneous conditions for objectivity. As he introduces the chapter on the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant argues that objectivity is formed through the subjective constitution of the mind; in the representation of an object, time and space are introduced by pure intuition; the elements of substance, force, divis­ ibility, etc., by the understanding, and the feeling of impenetrability, hardness, color, etc., by sensation.15 All three components of pure intuition, concepts of the understanding, and the sensations are nec­ essary for there to be a true representation of an object. Sensibility and thought are not two distinct stages of knowing; they just pro­ vide different sources of knowing, and, therefore, are examined as distinct elements of knowledge. But both are necessary in the for­ mation of the objects of experience. “Intuition and concepts consti­ tute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge/’16 Concepts must be made sensible and intuitions must be turned into thought for knowledge to occur. If thought occurs without sensation, the knowledge produced is empty and meaningless metaphysics; and if sensation occurs without the organization of thought, the result is a blind and senseless intuition. Understanding and the Subjective Constitution of Objectivity: The Transcendental Analytic The second major division of the Critique is the pure logical analysis of the rules and a priori principles of the understanding and their application to the intuitions in the process of knowing the ob­ jects of experience. Kant refers to this science of the faculty of the understanding and the transcendental application of its concepts as

36

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

the “transcendental analytic.” Within this division, the major issue is established through the “deduction” by which concepts are related to the objects of experience. Its purpose is to justify Kant’s theory of the a priori structure of the mind, the subjective constitution of ob­ jectivity, the application of concepts to empirical reality, the system­ atic ordering of all concepts into a coherent whole, and the founda­ tion of knowledge and the natural sciences. As the structuring prin­ ciple and condition for the possibility of experience, the mind con­ stitutes the given reality as it is known to consciousness. By show­ ing the limits of the application of the concepts of science and knowl­ edge in experience, Kant hopes to expose dialectically the inappro­ priate use of the understanding in the area of metaphysics. His goal is to expose the “false illusions” and “groundless pretensions” of metaphysical claims to truth.17 The understanding is a faculty of thought and judgment through which the representations of intuitions are joined together in two ways—under the categories of the understanding and under general concepts (abstract universals), respectively. The first type of con­ cept refers to the a priori or transcendental categories of the under­ standing which unite many distinct intuitions in perception and ex­ perience. These concepts consist of non-empirical, a priori rules of the intellect, or categories of the understanding, which are the transcendental foundations for all possible objects of experience, and which structure thought and cognition in a transcendental logic. The manifold of intuition and its representations must be organized into an objectivity of experience through an imaginative synthesis within a self-conscious understanding. Sense impressions provide the material for the concepts of the understanding. Without these intuitions, the understanding floats about aimlessly; its ideas are empty, contentless, and not bound to any empirical reality. And with­ out the understanding, our intuitions and representations about the world of appearances are chaotic, meaningless, and irrational. They could never be known in any systematic and coherent way. The understanding provides the determinate framework in which objects are related to each other and to themselves in terms of cause and effect, substance and accident, unity and plurality, possibility, change, and actuality, and so forth. It is the synthetic capability of the mind to unify the intuitions within a broader framework of the understanding to order systematically our experiences of the world. In this way, objectivity becomes intelligible and meaningful. The

Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity

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receptive capability of sensibility provides the understanding with the material for the concepts to organize into a coherent unity. In this way determinate and phenomenal objects are formed in thought by means of the synthesis of intuition and understanding.18 The second type of concept is the empirical abstraction or univer­ sal category, such as the word: house, dog, justice, etc. In every judgment, various types of representations, both empirical intuitions and ideas, are synthesized into a statement about the world by means of abstract universals. When the sentence, “That is a house,” is ut­ tered, direct empirical perceptions are brought together by an ab­ stract representation in thought. The common characteristics ab­ stracted from intuitive perception over time are formed into univer­ sal concepts, which are united with an immediate object in the present to form a judgment about what is seen; the particular is subsumed under the universal in cognition and by this means predicates are attributed to objects of perception. It is the first type of concept—the a priori or transcendental con­ cept—which forms the foundation of Kant’s analysis. According to him, the justification of time and space as a priori forms of sensibil­ ity rests in our direct empirical intuition of these forms, since objects cannot be imagined without them; they could not appear to us ex­ cept in time and space. But, he argues, objects may appear to us without being subsumed under the categories of the understanding. Also the objects created through the understanding are formed in thought and thus relate to objects universally. An example offered by Kant is the statement, “All bodies are divisible.” The multiplicity and diversity of intuitions about the body are organized or mediated around the unity of the concept of divisibility: They are not directly intuited in sense impressions. Therefore they are of a different type which requires a different form of justification. This he calls the tran­ scendental deduction. “We are faced by the problem how these con­ cepts can relate to objects which they yet do not obtain from any experience.” 19 This is a continuation of the dilemma of objective validity precipitated by Hume’s startling insight into the nature of science and causality. Causal regularity cannot be justified through the contingency of accumulated experience, since the empirical can never provide experience with the necessity and universality required by science. For Kant, there are only two options: Either we must reject the notion of causality entirely or derive it a priori from the understanding itself. The formal principles organizing the diffuse

38

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

and indiscrete manifold of appearances are the forms of intuition and understanding, acting in unity with each other.20 The question now arises whether a priori concepts do not also serve as antecedent conditions under which alone anything can be, if not intuited, yet thought as object in general. In that case all empirical knowledge of objects would necessarily conform to such concepts, because only as thus presupposing them is anything possible as o b je c t o f ex perien ce. Now all experience does indeed contain, in addition to the intuition of the senses through which something is given, a c o n c e p t of an object as thereby given, that is to say, as appearing. Concepts of objects in general thus underlie all empirical knowl­ edge as its a priori conditions. The objective validity of the categories as a priori concepts rests, therefore, on the fact that, so far as the form of thought is concerned, through them alone does experience become possible. They relate of necessity and a priori to objects of experience, for the reason that only by means of them can any object whatsoever of experience be thought.21

The understanding provides the categories which establish the a priori conditions for the possibility of experience in the subjective constitution of the mind. Thus Kant’s great contribution to Western epistemology is his theory that the mind can never be indifferent to intuitions, but participates in transforming and recreating them through the structure of the forms of time and space and concepts of the understanding. Subjectivity is involved in the constitution of objectivity. The understanding thus functions as the unifying struc­ ture to all experience which integrates the multiplicity of informa­ tion being provided by the senses. Undetermined objects are ini­ tially given through the intuition but are formed in the understand­ ing. Until objects are experienced in thought, given a determinate and concrete existence, framed within a coherent unity, and orga­ nized in relation to other objects within a field of meaning, there can be no true objectivity. There would only be instances of temporal and spatial fluxes. To organize the information provided by the senses and forms of intuition, the unarticulated flow of the manifold of im­ pressions must be further formed into a unity by a spontaneous and creative synthesis of consciousness—the ego. “For knowledge is [essentially] a whole in which representations stand compared and connected.”22 All the pieces of the Kantian puzzle are put together in this sec­ tion on the transcendental deduction. The imaginative conscious­ ness holds the various undifferentiated and indiscriminate sense impressions together over time and in space within a unified field of references and representations. The imagination holds the sensations, intuitions, and concepts together to form a unified and objective

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experience of empirical reality.23 This transcendental moment per­ mits the mind to connect all representations into a unified conscious­ ness that is aware of holding together all representations. This is what Kant calls the “transcendental unity of apperception” which he describes as the “transcendental ground of the unity of conscious­ ness in the synthesis of the manifold of all our intuitions, and conse­ quently also of the concepts of objects in general, and so of all ob­ jects of experience, a ground without which it would be impossible to think any object for our intuitions.”24 Consciousness synthesizes the intuitions through concepts in order to integrate the manifold into a unity of thought that persists over time. The foundations of the appearance in terms of the necessity, unity, and objectivity of the manifold of representations lie in the formal and logical unity of consciousness and its ability to synthesize the plurality of intuitions. This synthetic unity produced by the transcendental subject brings order, relations, and substance to the indeterminate confusion of the manifold. This is the purpose of concepts which organize impres­ sions into a coherent pattern of internal and external relations ac­ cording to rules established by the synthetic and reproductive power of the mind. It is the awareness of this original and necessary self that provides the unifying function of thought; it is the form of sub­ jectivity and the unity of consciousness, which precedes all collec­ tion of the data of intuition and is assumed to be necessary for the possibility of experience; it is the prior logical condition of all knowl­ edge. Without this subjectivity, objectivity, as the synthesis of ap­ pearances within concepts, would be impossible. Kant argues at this point that the faculty of thought as a unified consciousness prepares, determines, and precedes objects of both intuition and experience. In the end, knowledge is produced by the imaginative integration of intuition and the understanding, of the sensible and the intellectual, of appearances and the categories of the mind. Neo-Kantian Understanding of History and Nature Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) was a student of Wilhelm Windelband in Strassburg when he completed his dissertation, Zur Lehre der Definition, in 1888. His habilitation, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, was finished three years later in Freiburg, where he re­ ceived his first teaching position and later a professorship with the support of Max Weber upon the departure of Alois Riehl. In 1902 he completed his major work, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

Begrijfsbildung (The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Sci­ ence), which was a neo-Kantian examination of the limits of con­ cept formation in the natural and cultural sciences.25 In it, he rejects D ilthey’s subjectivism and intuitionalism, the irrationalism of Lebensphilosophie, the relativity of historicism and psychologism, and the universal validity and realism of positivism in relation to the study of history. He attempts instead to establish the differences in the methodological and logical foundations of the natural sciences and the historical sciences by beginning with the Kantian question: What are the conditions for knowledge about the natural and historical worlds? Reality as nature and reality as history are created by the transcendental subject. The distinctive logic and methods of the natural and historical sciences form the very reality they study. This work would be crucial later to Weber’s own consideration of these same epistemological issues in his 1904 essay on objectivity in the social sciences. Rickert rejects the universal applicability and objectivity of the method of the natural sciences—positivism and naturalism—as ap­ propriate for the logic and subject matter of the historical sciences (.Kulturwissenschaften) by maintaining a separation between pure and practical reason. The natural and social sciences do not exam­ ine different realities, but constitute different conceptual realities formed by the logic and conceptual imperatives of their distinct dis­ ciplines. It is the perspective of the investigators that carves out a part of the heterogeneous reality. They carve out of the infinite mul­ tiplicity of unarticulated impressions of reality (thing-in-itself) dis­ tinctive aspects formed by the logic of the concept formation in his­ tory and nature. History and nature are not distinct ontological enti­ ties studied by the natural and historical sciences with their compet­ ing methodologies. They are, in fact, created by the different meth­ ods of discrimination and conceptualization found in each area. Draw­ ing upon Windelband’s rectorial address of 1894 at the University of Strassburg, “History and Natural Science,” and his distinction between nomothetic and idiographic methods, Rickert helps articu­ late the now famous neo-Kantian position of the Southwest School of thought.26 History is quite distinctive in its methodological orien­ tation since it is concerned with the unique and the particular. Natu­ ral science, on the other hand, is concerned with the formation of universal and predictive laws in nature. Each requires a different methodological procedure and concept formation in order to arrive at its constructed realities.

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Rickert borrows freely from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant looks for the limits of concept formation in natural science, the in­ ternal structure of the mind as represented by the transcendental sub­ ject, the integration of empiricism and rationalism, the rejection of innate knowledge and a copy theory of truth, and an examination of the relationship between consciousness and reality. He asks the ques­ tion about the universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of knowledge. Through his analysis of the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic, he opens up the internal logic of consciousness that lies in the a priori structure of the mind, categories of intuition (time and space), and the concepts of the understanding. His goal is to establish logically the foundations of Newtonian physics on the ground of subjectivity and consciousness. In his critique of metaphysics, he traces the limits of the application of the categories of science and pure reason in the empirical world. Rickert, in his return to Kant, asks this same question of the limits of concepts in the natural and cultural sciences. He, too, finds his answer in the empirical, that is, in the uniqueness, particularity, and individuality of the historical. History and natural science look for different things in the empirical, they use different methods and log­ ics, and seek different realities. Thus the logic, method, and concept formation of natural science could not appropriately be used in the study of discrete historical events. The goal of history is not to sub­ sume particular events under universal laws, predict future events, or explain past occurrences. Rather, the purpose of history is to un­ derstand the meaning of an event in terms of its particular setting and unique causes in time. Thus the methods of history and science are contradictory and one is not applicable to the other. Rickert ex­ pands the original questions and inquiry of Kant by applying them to the critique of historical reason. In the process, he moves well be­ yond Kant’s original intentions, as he continues to apply his critical method, transcendental logic, and critique of objectivism, naturalism, and positivism to the study of history. Taking his major cues from Kant and Windelband, Rickert develops a critical theory of histori­ cal method and objectivity, and thereby provides the foundation for many crucial elements in Weber’s later methodological writings.27 The most important distinction between natural and historical sci­ ence is that the former distances itself from the immediacy of life and empirical sense perception by creating general concepts under which are subsumed all individual experience. The world is made-

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up of an infinite and indeterminate manifold of impressions from which the sciences constitute both logically and methodologically the content of their representations and conceptualizations. Natural science abstracts from the content of experience in order to develop general natural laws; the richness and diversity of empirical reality is replaced by general concepts that abstract from its particularity and individuality. History relies on just this very particularity and singularity that natural science rejects for rarefied and simplified conceptual representations of nature. Natural science creates its own reality based on general concepts, abstractions from concrete actu­ ality, predictive and calculative theories, and the formation of gen­ eral laws about repeatable events. It is abstracted from any concern about human values. Through its criteria of selection, nature be­ comes devoid of meaning and significance, unable to be understood, and indifferent to values. Natural science is not interested in exam­ ining the meaning or cause of particular events, experiences, or per­ sonal actions. The opposition between the natural and historical sciences is thus logical as the indeterminate manifold is formed through the catego­ ries of the scientific mind. Science constructs its own reality accord­ ing to the logic and cognitive interests of whether it is examining nature or history. The implication Rickert derives from this logical and methodological distinction between the sciences is that all sci­ entific representations are abstractions from the irrationality and mindless manifold of empirical perception and thus cannot act as immediate reproductions of reality itself. He rejects empiricism, con­ ceptual realism, and a copy theory of truth as he relies on Kant’s epistemology and constitution theory of truth. Reality is never re­ produced directly but only through the intermediary of ideas and concepts. The thing-in-itself can never be known. Rickert writes, “It can be shown on the basis of general logical considerations that no knowledge can possibly provide a reproduction [of empirical real­ ity]. This is because every knowledge claim must take the form of a judgment. In other words, it is impossible, as this is usually expressed, for the truth of knowledge to consist in the ‘agreement of the idea with its object.’”28 Just as our perception of objectivity is filtered through the values and judgments of the categories of the mind in our daily experience of the world, so too, are the sciences formed through logical and substantive values and judgments about the world.

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Reality is neither reproduced nor mirrored but represented through the valid forms of scientific consciousness and concept formation; the sciences select and organize the essential elements of the indiscriminant manifold according to their own method and logic. The natural and historical sciences have different formal methods of concept formation according to whether they are selecting general or particular characteristics from perception. History can never be known using the logical perspective of the natural sciences. “Em­ pirical reality becomes nature when we conceive it with reference to the general. It becomes history when we conceive it with reference to the distinctive and the individual.”29 The historical form of con­ cept formation is consciously created by the cognitive interest in understanding individual and unique historical events. It is this very interest which provides the logical and methodological foundation for concept formation in the historical sciences. Any attempt to seek universal laws in history would lead, according to Rickert, to a “logi­ cal absurdity.” The infinite manifold and indeterminate diversity of the immedi­ ately given world is transformed in a conceptual framework that organizes and filters experience through the logical interests and priorities of the natural and historical sciences. They ask entirely different questions, are interested in different issues, and apply dif­ ferent methodologies. The result is that they produce different forms of reality—one for the calculation and prediction of events and the other for an understanding of the particularity and singularity of his­ torical occurrences. The irrational and meaningless diversity of the empirical world is transformed by human rationality and reconsti­ tuted by the cognitive interests of the sciences. The relationships between concepts and reality (which Rickert recognizes is an issue that goes back to Greek philosophy and the Socratic dialogues) are determined not by the imperatives of the transcendental subject but by the logical priorities of the scientist in seeking general or particu­ lar representations of the actual world. The selection process is de­ termined by the logical priorities of the different methodological approaches which create these new mental constructs according to what is essential in each form of science. Validity, according to this perspective, results not from the correspondence of concepts with reality, since the latter is irrational and infinite. Rather, objective va­ lidity of science results from the proper logical form or search for valid and essential—general or individual—concepts.

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Reality itself is not directly accessible through concepts, but is transformed in the process of knowing and reshaped in the concep­ tual process of generalization and individualization. Reality is the thing-in-itself and, as such, is unknowable. If there is no prior objec­ tivity or reality that is capable of grounding knowledge in the natu­ ral and historical sciences, then what happens to the issue of the validity and objectivity of knowledge? The traditional foundations of epistemology in the realm of perception and reflection have dis­ appeared with the introduction of the elements of subjectivity and consciousness into the process of knowing—experience and sci­ ence.30 Kant had introduced consciousness into the knowledge of nature and Rickert expands the Kantian paradigm to include ques­ tions of historical representation and individual objectivity. How­ ever, as we will see in the next chapter, Nietzsche radicalizes the Kantian critique of pure and practical reason by contending that objectivity is only a form of subjectivity or consciousness, thereby introducing the issue of relativity into the discussion about method­ ology and scientific validity. The lines of argument from both Rickert and Nietzsche then will be incorporated into Weber’s epistemologi­ cal distinction between value relevance and value freedom. Rickert’s Theory of Value and Objectivity History differs from natural science not only formally in terms of its logic and method, but also materially in terms of the content of its concepts. The material and methods of representation create differ­ ent objects of scientific inquiry. Historical objects are objects of cul­ tural significance and meaning, and are formed through a selection process defined by the cultural values of the investigator. The value relevance (Wertbeziehung) of historical understanding arises from the cultural life of the community, and it is through these values that the individuality and uniqueness of historical representation are cre­ ated. Rickert emphasizes that the goal of history is to understand selectively the historical phenomena, whereas natural science, us­ ing a value-free concept formation, explains objects by subsuming them under timeless universal laws. Rickert distinguishes between the causal laws of natural science and the historical nexus and cau­ sality of historical science. The values, which guide the historian in discriminating and delineating the objectivity of historical events and persons, rest on a priori presuppositions. At the same time, these presuppositions ground the objective validity of these representa-

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tions. Rejecting historicism and relativism, Rickert contends that the universal validity of these values lies in a universal philosophy of history that justifies their application.31 That is, the objective valid­ ity of historical science rests on the objectivity of concept forma­ tion, the universality of value relevance, and the material content of historical representations (objects of history). Weber, as we will see in chapter 3, rejects this notion of cultural and value-relevant uni­ versality, as well as Rickert’s philosophy of history, due to the postmodern influence of Nietzsche’s more radical appropriation of Kantian epistemology and theory of subjectivity and values. Rickert connects his neo-Kantian epistemology with his method­ ology through the use of his concepts of “source material” and “fac­ tual material.” The former is the immediately given profusion and infinite manifold of perception, whereas the latter is the processed material of historical objects and facts upon which later “historical representations” will be created. The difficulty in doing history is magnified due to the fact that historians do not have direct access to historical facts, which can only be inferred from the source material. The problem arises in that “the historian has to represent all the prop­ erties of his objects that experience makes available in any way at all. In that case, there seems to be no basis for the claim that concept formation in history can even be conceptually distinguished from the determination of facts.”32 The distinction between epistemology and methodology, as well as the dualism between the formal and material bases of scientific conceptualization, provides the transcen­ dental conditions for the possibility of historical knowledge. This is fascinating to Rickert, who wonders whether there is any difference in history between historical facts and historical concepts. The dis­ tinction between facts and concepts becomes blurred within a neoKantian methodology of concept formation, since facts and repre­ sentations are formed through an a priori value-added selection pro­ cess. Both are, in fact, forms of representation. Rickert at times comes close, but ultimately refuses to make the final step to the view articu­ lated by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that “the world is my repre­ sentation.”33 Just as he rejects empiricism and a copy theory of truth, he rejects the existence of pure facts upon which such a science could be founded. Facts are abstracted by the historian from the infinite and indistinct source material and from these facts he or she then chooses only the essential elements to be part of a conceptual representation of the world.34 Both the historical facts of normal

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perception and the essential representations of the scientist are pre­ formed and preselected by the historian. Therefore, truth claims can­ not be adjudicated by a simple correspondence between concepts and reality. The latter is inaccessible to rational inquiry since be­ tween the historian and reality (thing-in-itself) lies the source mate­ rial of perception, the factual material of historical experience, and the historical representations of the scientist. An example offered by Rickert to clarify this methodological is­ sue is that of the importance of Friedrich Wilhelm IV for German history. The historian distinguishes between his abdication of the imperial crown and his relationship to his tailor. The principle of selection of what is essential (real) and unessential is not an arbitrary and relative choice. Reason becomes indifferent to the unessential facts of a historical event or of the life of a person. Rickert is clear that history cannot reproduce what really happened idiographically in the past, but rather relies upon a “governing perspective” that discriminates and defines a historically important event or occur­ rence based on generally accepted values, which become “the prin­ ciples of historical representation.” It creates a reality based on nor­ mative values and a philosophical perspective (Weltanschauung) which is anything but indifferent and arbitrary. This governing per­ spective of general values is the result of “existential judgments” that determine the validity of the historical representation based on the common sense values of the community. Through the common political, moral, and aesthetic valuations as to what is important, objects are created for historical investigation by the inquiring sci­ entist. Validity, as a methodological category, refers not to objective correspondence between concepts and objects, but rather to the va­ lidity of the values of the differentiating reason. Since concept for­ mation in history does not use general concepts as does natural sci­ ence, its concepts are thus particular, nonreal constructs. As Rickert says, history cannot incorporate the real objects of historical percep­ tion directly into historical representations: History can no more incorporate its real objects themselves— for example Caesar, the Thirty Years’ War, the rise of the manors, or Dutch painting— into its representation than natural science can. On the contrary, it is obliged to form “ideas” of Caesar or “ideas” o f the rise o f the manors that hold validly and therefore are nonreal. Because the content o f these ideas never coincides exactly with the infinitely diverse real processes, they are still “concepts”— even though they have no g e n e ra l content— in the sense that in them, what is essential for history is singled out from reality and comprehended...35

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Access to individual historical facts and the essential reality is indirect and requires the use of nonreal and abstract historical con­ cepts that extract their content from the material source. The content of these concepts of history is derived from existential judgments of selection and general principles of representation. Thus he concludes that both natural science and historical science are ultimately based on general concepts—the former on universal laws of nature and the latter on universal values of historical judgment. This difference between laws and values is the distinguishing characteristic between the sciences at the level of substantive methodology and concept formation. Values and Indifference Within the critique of historical reason a distinction is made be­ tween practical valuation and value relationships (Wertbeziehung) that has no correlate in the natural sciences. In order for reality to be divided (Individuendum) into in-dividuals (In-dividuum), historical concepts based on values of general significance must first throw these singular events or persons into relief. The idea of Caesar or the Thirty Years’ War must be clearly articulated in order that the histori­ cal individual be created from the infinite confusion of the percep­ tual reality. The object is formed from this selection of historically essential elements into its representation.36 Thus the historian must evaluate history theoretically but never practically. Evaluation is cru­ cial for the formation of historical representations of individuals, but nothing can be said regarding the moral quality of history. That is, nothing good or bad may be said about the objects under investiga­ tion; no value judgments may be applied to the historical representa­ tions themselves. Principles and perspectives guide the creation of his­ torical objects for analysis and understanding. However, historical rea­ son cannot be transformed into practical reason for the purpose of morally judging or politically evaluating historical individuals. History is not a valuing science. “Thus his mode of activity is always representa­ tional, and not judgmental. In other words, he [the historian] shares the perspectives of considering something with the practical person, but not the activity of willing and valuing itself....History is not a valuing science but a value-relevant science.” 37 Value perspectives are necessary in order to form the concepts of the historical sciences without which historians could not understand history. They are the cognitive interests that highlight aspects of the

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phenomena of reality under investigation in order to en-lighten the historically relevant material. History has a value to the extent that there is a general consensus about exactly what is worth studying. It is in this sense that history deals with general concepts. Through the use of normative principles having a general significance, historical objects that are unique and individual are formed. Thus the indi­ vidual is constructed to be an essential and significant in-dividual by means of a “theoretical value relationship” that abstracts from the plurality and diversity of reality to form the unique and particu­ lar. Reality is divided up into that part which fits into general con­ cepts and that part which has individualizing concepts. Within this division, history is conceptually formed when individuals embody universal values that are significant to the community as a whole. The objectivity of historical experience rests on the universal valid­ ity and objectivity of these community values.38 Rickert’s theory of value is directly related to his theory of histori­ cal objectivity. As critical theory has evolved from Kant and Hegel through Windelband, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, the guiding in­ sight has always been that the truth of objectivity lies in subjectivity and that the object of historical knowledge is created by the subjec­ tive forms of historical consciousness. Rickert divides reason into the theoretical reason of the historian and the practical reason of the moralist. Values are necessary to form the objects of historical expe­ rience as they are placed in spatial, temporal, and causal frameworks. But they may not be used to evaluate the truth or validity of the values or historical objects themselves. This is why Rickert makes a clear distinction between representation and conceptualization, on the one hand, and willing and action on the other. Like Kant, he maintains a sharp split between a critique of pure reason and practi­ cal reason, epistemology and moral philosophy. Positivism does not distinguish between a critical theory of objectivity (relevance) and a practical theory of objectivity (valuation). According to Rickert, rea­ son is only indifferent to values at the practical level, not at the theo­ retical level. Reason is only silent when dealing with moral issues: It is incapable of making value judgments about history or of offering substantive advice on its direction; it cannot evaluate the past or the future. However, when Weber incorporates this insight into his early methodological writings at the beginning of the twentieth century, he adds a dimension that Rickert argues is not a part of the historian’s method—’’value-free science” ( W ertfreiheit). It will require

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Nietzsche’s critical theory of perspectivism and nihilism to fill out this added dimension to the theory of historical objectivity and rep­ resentation. Rickert argues that, whether the historian is a radical democrat, free trader, aristocrat, or protectionist, values cannot be applied in negative or positive evaluation of a historical event. There will al­ ways be a diversity of opinions concerning what is to be negatively or positively valued. Political and moral pluralism cannot justify or impose itself on the formation of historical reality. The historian must be silent when it comes to valuation of historical individuals, but discriminating when it comes to the formation of historical repre­ sentations. Thus there is an important distinction between history and politics, methodology and morality. Whereas the values of prac­ tical reason are diverse, plural, and particular, the values of the his­ torian are based on a common conceptual perspective or worldview of reality. Reality arises from values in the creation of history be­ cause of the formal and material nature of the historical method. This helps distinguish between essential and non-essential, arbitrary constructions in history. Everyone knows what is important and sig­ nificant; the philosophical debate is over the practical evaluation of that fact. “The fact that cultural values are universal in this sense is what keeps concept-formation in the historical sciences from being altogether arbitrary and thus constitutes the primary basis of its ‘objectivity.’”39 When the Protestant Reformation is the topic under scientific investigation, Luther will always be a central figure. How­ ever, whether Luther is viewed positively or negatively must remain the private perspective of the indifferent historian who should not express this view publicly. The scientist must abstain from judgments about competing values in society. This is the limited sense in which the historian must be free from value judgments, but it does not make history a value-free science. Implicit in Rickert’s argument is the distinction between freedom from value judgments and freedom from values (value free­ dom). Rickert rejects the focus of positivism and realism on the rela­ tion of concepts to objects by emphasizing the relation of objects to values. Only in the natural sciences are values dissociated from con­ cept formation. That is, only natural science can be value free. This is true, as Rickert is aware, except for the need to value science itself. Historical concepts are formed through the application of po­ litical, religious, aesthetic, or moral values that the community ac-

50

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason

knowledges as significant. In this way, the concept of the Renais­ sance or Reformation is thrown into relief and becomes an object of historical investigation. Without this theoretical value, there is no object of study. Through the categories of the historian’s mind, the historical in-dividuals are created from the infinite profusion of em­ pirical reality. The mind gives life to history and the historian gives form to objectivity. The historical individual is thus created from values which emphasize the unique and essential in history, according to the general perception of the community. Rickert distinguishes between the formation of the historical ob­ jects and the extensive manifold of things in general. He further distinguishes the essential elements of the particular historical indi­ vidual from the intensive manifold of that single individual. That is, unique events and persons are abstracted from both the extensive complexity of the world and the intensive multiplicity of the indi­ vidual event.40 The latter’s logical process he calls a teleological concept formation. He rejects the proposal that purposive or techni­ cal rationality could become the basis for defining the essential char­ acteristics of historical events.41 Tracing the conscious purposes of historical individuals is not the only principle of selection for his­ torical representation, since the historical individual does not have to be the individual personality or conscious being which makes history. Rather the logical criteria of selection of the value perspec­ tive is the uniqueness and particularity of the person or event. And this may include a general concept or historical nexus representing a comprehensive entity such as the Italian Renaissance or Romantic movement, which is itself constituted by a plurality of individuals within a complex causal network that is tied to the past and present. Culture and Meaning in History After full investigation into the logical structure of concept for­ mation in the historical sciences, Rickert turns to an analysis of its substantive properties. At this point he argues that it is the mental life of historical individuals which forms the material foundation of history. The objects of historical study are the volitional actions and mental processes of individuals. These psychic or mental processes form the limits of conceptualization in the historical sciences. To this extent the historian must place himself or herself in the mental life of the other in order to recreate the other’s experience. Repre­ sentation of historical objects requires a method different from the

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natural sciences in that the historian must create new forms of inter­ pretation through historical understanding of the other’s mental life and activity. From its formal logical aspect, history relates values to objects; from its material character, it relates the mental life of the valuating individuals through general values. According to Rickert, “the concept of value also establishes the relationship between the mental and the historical.”42 It is his theory of value which ties to­ gether both the formal and material aspects of concept formation in history. Values are central both to the logic of methods and historical representations and to the content of historical understanding. In the process of individualization, historical individuals are created whose substance lies in mental phenomena and the psychic life of the his­ torical material. History studies the mental process of objects and volitional actions. These historical personalities who valuate, or create their own worlds through valuation, provide the substantive material for the governing principle of value selectivity. The subject once again articulates the object by referring to the latter’s mental life. The example Rickert offers is that of Italian art. The focus of attention of the historian will be on the choices and actions of the artists as historical entities, who created their own worlds of meaning within the community of Italian art. The object under investigation, therefore, must be related logi­ cally to values and materially to real valuating entities who, in turn, take positions regarding the initial governing values of the commu­ nity. These are what Rickert calls “historical centers.” This means that “to qualify as the object of a historical individualizing representation, an entity must not only stand in a general logical relationship to val­ ues, but must also have a real connection to an actual valuating be­ ing.”43 The logical foundation of history lies in scientific representa­ tions, value relevance, and concept individualization, whereas the material foundation of history—its historical object—lies in examin­ ing real beings, who value the world. The investigator places them within a historical nexus or social whole (complex interrelationships with others), and with other individuals as historical centers (mental beings at the heart of inquiry). As his argument about the nature of historical representation de­ velops in The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, Rickert clarifies and expands his original ideas about value relevance and concept formation. He maintains that for historical and cultural analy­ sis the historian should rely on theoretical values that delineate the

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essential elements of persons and events that come out of the his­ torical context itself. The understanding of mental beings requires that we understand them from within their own value perspective and cultural situation. Cultural objects are created and objectivity is formed transcendentally by the knowing subject, who relates to the external world by distinguishing between the essential and unessen­ tial aspects of events. In Rickert’s neo-Kantian theory of value, the value-related concepts guiding historical inquiry and governing the formation of representations correspond to the values of the vacat­ ing persons. “The values governing conceptualization are always to be derived from the historical material itself."44 These mental be­ ings or objects are the historical center around which objective and scientific study of history circulates. Rejecting Dilthey’s too narrow claim that the material of history is the real psychic life of individuals (Geisteswissenschaft), Rickert broadens the concept to include the notions of spirituality and cul­ ture.45 Relying instead on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Rickert, too, moves beyond Kant’s individual transcendental consciousness to view history as the study of the development of mental and cul­ tural phenomena. History re-presents the understanding of mental beings who take positions on “normatively general values” of the community within a complex causal and historical nexus. At this point in his analysis, it remains unclear what is the exact relationship he sees between in-dividuals formed from value-relevant categories that come out of the historian’s perspective from within his or her community and the values relevant to the historical object itself. The substantive difference between the natural and historical sci­ ences lies in the socially grounded cultural values that become the foundation for the choice of historical representations. The impor­ tant distinction now appears between nature and culture. If histori­ cal persons have taken a position on the general social values of art, morality, science, economy, religion, law, etc., then all the better for defining the essential elements in history. Rickert’s theory of history has moved from the logic of values to the substance of culture and real individuals. At this point in his argument about the nature of culture and meaning, he distinguishes between meaningful realities and nonreal meaning configurations (Geistesgebilde). The former is the representation of real individuals, whereas the latter refers to what Hegel called objective and absolute spirit. The term “culture” refers not only to real existence but also to cultural values chosen

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from the infinite source material. These cultural values are nonreal to the extent that they are immaterial and beyond the empirically real. The values themselves are abstract uni versais that have mean­ ing and significance and exist only through the historical object. To have reality they must inhere in real historical beings. They are not real and have no existence outside the living individual. The histori­ cal representations produced through value-relevant significance also have no reality. Though he does not use the term, they are what Weber will later call nonreal and utopian “ideal types.” Rickert offers the example of a religious congregation to explain his idea of nonreal meaning configurations. The methodological is­ sue behind the distinction between the real individual and nonreal culture is that the focus of attention is always on individual meaning and action. The corporeal real existence of the congregation lies in its buildings, equipment, sermons, music, and practitioners. The spirit that pervades its physical setting lies in its religious, theological, and aesthetic beliefs. It is this content-laden, distinctive meaning that the community shares, provides a common experience, and helps cre­ ate a religious congregation. But the spirit has no independent exist­ ence of its own; it is not real in the same way that the Zeitgeist, Greek spirit, and Renaissance are not realities. Only human beings can be the bearers of meaning configurations of society or commu­ nity. At this point Rickert begins to broaden his analysis of historical concepts. Historical science is the study of mental beings and nonreal meaning configurations. It contains individualizing concepts and concepts of general meaning; it is the science of individual reality and of nonreal spiritual configurations; it is the science of the par­ ticular and unique, as well as the general and universal; it examines real personalities and processes and unreal value and meaning; and it uses concepts of individualization and generalization. Returning to art as his example for understanding history, Rickert argues that the historian must examine real works of art produced by real human beings, that is, culture. However, the meaning of art is always an example of a nonreal aesthetic, whose spirit pervades real beings and is itself the nonreal configuration of cultural mean­ ing. Meaning exists to the extent that there are cultural entities and historical processes that contain and exhibit cultural significance. This is what is meant by the objectification and concretization of spirit in objective persons, institutions, processes, and events. The philosophy that underlies religion, art, science, politics, etc., is al-

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ways a general nonreal abstraction from real institutions and human beings. Rickert has reached the point in his analysis of the substan­ tive aspect of historical representations where history is viewed as the science of meaningful cultural realities and their spiritual essence. The central focus of history thus becomes the individual bearers, the historical centers of cultural meaning. By means of the understand­ ing of these cultural realities, the historian interprets history to have a meaning and purpose: The historian will best do justice to the distinctive character of his material in a thor­ oughly ‘objective’ fashion o n ly if he is led in the selection of what is essential by the sa m e values that provide the basis for the meaning of the cultural life of the historical centers: in other words, the human beings who appear in his material... .The distinctive central m a te r ia l of historical science— which, in its essence, is meaningful cultural life— is historically represented in such a way that the values that endow it with mean­ ing at the same time provide the governing principles of concept formation with the help of which historical science appropriates its material.46

When the external value-relevant concepts reflect the same inter­ nal cultural life of the community under investigation, when culture and history are integrated substantively and logically, the investiga­ tor has reached historical objectivity. Culture has meaning for the historian through value-relevant concepts and for human beings generally through the cultural life and spirit of historical processes. It has value for us and for them—it has methodological and histori­ cal value for us and cultural value for them. Rickert does not clarify the possible inconsistency in his argument between the value rel­ evance of the historian and the cultural values of the individuals under investigation. How are they related to each other? What hap­ pens when they are in conflict? Which values have priority—the values of the contemporary community or the acting subjects in the past? Weber, too, will stumble over this issue. Values are what the historian studies and what makes history possible. Thus the histo­ rian is not studying their psychic or mental state, but the past general meaning and significance of relevant cultural values. This study of the meaning of the spirit of historical objects provides Rickert with the substantive basis for his distinction between history and valuefree natural sciences. The examination of cultural life could never be value free because values must be the essential part of both the objective and subjective moments of historical science. How does Rickert pull all this apparently contradictory material together into a comprehensive logic of history? His answer is that only history “represents real events with reference to the nonreal

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meaning configurations adhering to these real events.”47 Rickert’s answer is that though the principle of selection of historical repre­ sentations comes from general value-relevant concepts, the mean­ ing configuration is always grasped as an individual. Thus the no­ tions of the Renaissance and of Greek spirit are general concepts experienced by the community as a whole, their content is compre­ hended by individuals and represents a distinct historical individual. Just as a group experiences together the listening to music, the con­ tent or appropriation of this experience is individual. Though shared generally by the community, the content is particular to a historical moment and time. Critical Understanding and Historical Reconstruction With his distinction between real beings and nonreal meaning, Rickert has arrived at the transcendental conditions for historical knowledge. History is the science of the cultural life and lived val­ ues of the past using the method of understanding. It examines real entities as the historical centers of values and meaning. Like Dilthey, he juxtaposes the different methods and logic of the natural and historical sciences, but he differs from Dilthey in that he does not attempt to understand directly or re-experience imaginatively the mental state of other individuals. There is no psychic transference or existential empathy. This is impossible for Rickert, since the psychic existence of others is not directly accessible to nor immediately ex­ perienced by the historian. Only their own objective mental states are directly accessible to historians. Historical science understands the historical reality as a spiritual whole embedded in a moment or event. “The grasp of a nonreal meaning configuration is what is usually meant by understanding.”48 Dilthey and Rickert differ on both the logic and substance of the interpretive method of under­ standing. For the latter, it is not a re-creation of the meaning and significance of the mental life of individuals since this is only an­ other form of psychologism. Rather, it involves the interpretive re­ creation of the nonreal meaning of a cultural experience in its real existence. The logic of history reflected in value-relevant categories is only the other side of the perspective of the cultural life that pervades the individual within history. Value relevance is necessary both at the logical and substantive end of the historical method. Historical real­ ity, that is, pure reality as a reproduction of what actually occurred

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in the past, is an empiricist dream having no methodological valid­ ity for the study of history. History can never be value neutral. Rickert has not abandoned his initial view of the individualizing representa­ tion with the addition of a general theory of nonreal meaning con­ struction. It is through the latter that the cultural values and histori­ cal meaning become real. Historical reality is always a reconstruc­ tion of the past in which real entities are joined to cultural values in an attempt to “approximate” the reality of the past. Another example offered by Rickert is art history. The scholar is not interested in recreating the merely formal objects involved in painting, such as color and canvas; the scholar is interested in getting at the aesthetic meaning of art itself by re-experiencing the meaning configuration of other persons. Rickert now raises an even more delicate and epistemologically more troubling question about the substantive validity of historical representation. He asks about the relationship between historical rep­ resentations and the real individuality of others. If historical con­ cepts are re-creations of historical personalities and events, then what is their ontological reality? What is the substantive status of these re­ creations? What does it mean to “approximate” the perceptual real­ ity of individuals? If historians were limited to understanding only the immediate empirical reality or private psychic experience of oth­ ers, then they could never re-create the nonreal meaning context of historical individuals. A whole range of experiences would lie out­ side historical knowledge, experiences such as social movements, schools of thought, spiritual contexts, etc. Access to the other’s real mental life is possible only through the mediation of a spiritual con­ figuration or the commonly shared values of a community. This nonreal meaning permits us to look into the real mental life of other individuals by means of interpretive understanding which builds a bridge between our own psychic selves and the mental life of the other. We begin by understanding the meaning context of a histori­ cal occurrence. We then reflect on how we would understand our own mental processes and reconstruct the mental life of others by extrapolating from our own experience to that of the other person— by transposing ourselves into the other indirectly. The immediate experience of the other is not available to us, but an extrapolation and re-creation is. We can understand the other “on the basis of our own knowledge of mental life in general, which is grounded in our own mental life—we can construct the mental life

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of another person in such a way that we acquire mediated knowl­ edge of it as an interpretation of nonreal meaning and real mental life that can be re-created.”49 From our knowledge of the nonreal cultural meaning and our own mental life, the historian constructs the mental life of the other. We view the other as having a vital life as the historical center of the spiritual configuration in ways similar to our own situation. We transcendentally reconstruct the historical experience of vital mental life and meaning creation by asking the question: What are the universal and necessary preconditions for the creation of the vital mental life of the other within a specific spiritual configuration? Having said all this about historical recon­ struction, Rickert argues that the representation of past individual events is neither arbitrary nor artificial. Instead he maintains that by this reconstructive method, the historian gains access to the unique­ ness and perceptual reality of the corporeal and psychic individual. It is the material content of historical reality that is being reconstructed through this critical hermeneutic. Rickert’s Critique of Positivism and Foundationalism At this point in his analysis, Rickert undertakes a full-blown cri­ tique of positivism in the form of empiricism, naturalism, and ob­ jectivism. In an acceptance of the Kantian critique of Hume, Rickert maintains that there are no pure facts or impressions unmediated by subjective consciousness. There is no direct access to objectiv­ ity and the test of objectivity does not lie in a correspondence to empirical facts or absolute reality. Historical science always trans­ forms the manifold of empirical reality through its subjective rep­ resentations. The forms of consciousness make it impossible to reproduce the immediately given in experience. As Rickert says, “Science advances by reshaping and simplifying the immediately given....Science cannot reproduce empirical reality.”50 He asks if a metaphysical reality exists behind the world of the appear­ ances. Does the rejection of an empirical objectivity because of the primacy of the forms of consciousness presuppose a meta­ physical reality behind the appearances? The goal of natural science is to uncover the essential reality and laws of nature through its concept formation. History is limited to the phe­ nomena of becoming and the individual world of the appearances. This world remains irrational and infinite, as it expresses “the in­ difference of the real to the concept and to value.”51

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Rickert rejects the idea that objectivity and the epistemological foundations of truth can be based on either empirical facts or meta­ physical essences. Neither realism nor idealism, sensible impressions nor ideas can be the foundation of truth claims in the historical sci­ ences. They are both examples of false objectivity for they rest on an inadequate appreciation of how historical forms and understand­ ing are created. Neither empirical nor metaphysical reality are ac­ cessible to the historical mind, since reality is always mediated through historical consciousness. Objectivity in history is derived from an objectivity transformed by the forms or governing values of subjec­ tivity. Though Rickert is not aware of the full implications of his own thinking on the logic of history, he does present the building blocks for a rejection of traditional epistemology and a move to­ ward a new theory of history. If the truth of historical understanding does not lie in natural science, empirical actuality (Wirklichkeit) or essential reality {Realität), then where does it lie? Suppose we call the “object” of knowledge that with which conceptual knowledge must conform in order to be “objective.” Then, in fact, since that object can be equivalent neither to an absolutely real being nor to empirical reality— what we know is not the actual [w irk liche] or really [real] existing “objects” o f concepts in natural science or history. For us it is only the factual material reshaped in the concept that is actual [wirklich] or real [real]. For this reason, the validity of concepts can depend only on the kind of activity in which the cognitive subject engages in forming them.52

Like Kant, Rickert rejects empiricism and rationalism as inadequate to the justification of values and objectivity. He calls this position “epistemological subjectivism.” The validity of historical represen­ tation rests not in a privileged access to the object through sensation or reason, but in the activity of the valuing subject. In his critique of historical reason, he deconstructs the “impressions” of Hume and the “ideas” of Descartes to arrive at a neo-Kantian theory of histori­ cal objectivity. “There simply is no ‘real’ world that is produced as it actually is by the content of our concepts, or at least we have no knowledge of such a world.”53 At most, Rickert is an epistemologi­ cal atheist and, at the very least, he is an agnostic. There is no real world lying behind impressions and ideas that could serve as the foundation for scientific objectivity. This role would be taken through­ out his work by the valuing subject and the validity of theoretical values used to trans-form the manifold and irrationality of empirical reality. Nor can historical science have access to this reality directly through induction or deduction (a priori knowledge), since, as Hume

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had argued, any attempt to justify these forms of reasoning leads to circular and absurd arguments. Searching for Universality and Validity in Historical Science In the last chapter of The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, Rickert offers slightly different variations to the question of foundationalism. He attempts to justify his theory of value and sci­ ence by appealing to a universal and unchanging standard of value for concept formation in historical science. But this standard changes over time. Sometimes he uses a Weltanschauung or philosophy of history, sometimes a community standard of social consensus, and at other times he uses the principle of a universal imperative of the autonomous will. Thus there appears to be a minor tension through­ out the book between the individual and society, that is, between the cognitive and moral consciousness of the individual and the com­ monly shared values of the community. This remains an unresolved tension between two elements in Rickert’s theory—Kant’s transcen­ dental subject (Moralität) and Hegel’s moral community (Sittlichkeit). The conflict between the different interpretations disappears if K ant’s transcendental subject becomes a transcendental intersubjectivity, that is, if one argues that the values of moral con­ sciousness are universal and thus universally shared by the commu­ nity. There is always an unrelieved tension between the individual and community in neo-Kantian thought. Rickert rejects empirical actuality and metaphysical reality, naturalistic facts and rationalistic ideas, as the basis for historical knowledge and objectivity. The an­ swer to the question of the ground of knowledge has shifted from empirical and ideational objectivity to the cognitive subject. “Thus we can show that an autonomous will that ‘freely’ wills what it should is a good whose value, precisely from the theoretical standpoint, can never be placed in doubt.”54 But this idea is a later addition to his original 1902 work. It appears to be added without any attempt to reconcile it with his earlier position. Rickert simply left the incon­ sistency in place. As he moves from one form of legitimation to another, the em­ phasis and meaning of his theory changes. At the end of his work, he focuses on the autonomous will of the valuing subject which has validity “beyond all doubt,” since the very willing itself has uncon­ ditional value for Rickert. It is the categorical imperative which pro­ vides the absolute and necessary value to the individual and the

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historian. That is, the imperative provides individuals with the nec­ essary values to lead a good life and understand historical events. Community and culture that develop in society are themselves grounded in the autonomous will, which Rickert argues is also a social will. The will produces values which have absolute validity for the willing subject and historical reason. This validity of histori­ cal understanding and knowledge lies in the absolute certitude and universality of the will and in its creation of objective cultural mean­ ing through its choice of subject matter. In the next chapter, we will see that Nietzsche adds another di­ mension to this view of the epistemological centrality of the will as he further radicalizes the Kantian critique of practical reason with his notions of the “will to power” and “perspectivism.” Rickert had taken Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason and applied them to the critique of historical reason. He, too, rejected the traditional epistemological foundations for knowledge lying outside the sub­ ject in the objectivity of the senses or reason. However, like Kant, he salvages the Enlightenment view of rationality and universal­ ity in the form of the subject. Nietzsche pushes this argument one step beyond by rejecting the objective meaning and abso­ lute universality of practical reason. The validity of concept for­ mation will no longer lie in the validity of the transcendental subject or the universality of the cultural values produced by the categorical imperative. Rather, the validity of the imperative rests with the power of the self-determination of the individual will to resist the idols, that is, universals, of Western rationality. Kant had moved the universality of reason from the universal object to the universal subject. Nietzsche moves it beyond the transcenden­ tal subject to the Dionysian individual. This creates difficulties later in Weber’s theory of history, since he integrates Rickert’s logic of history with Nietzsche’s theory of nihilism. By relying on Nietzsche, Weber dispenses with Rickert’s theory of the gen­ eral values of the value-relevant subject, the value universalism that grounds objectivity in the historical sciences, and the search for supra-historical absolutes within culture. They are replaced by Weber’s own view of value relevance and the nihilism of the knowing subject within a universe of competing and irreconcilable values. Rationalization and disenchantment make value universal­ ism and trans-historical objectivity impossible in the cultural sci­ ences. This integration of Rickert and Nietzsche, Kant and Dionysus

Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity

61

creates interesting problems for later interpretations of Weber’s own theory of value. Notes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

Thomas Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860-1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 102-30, and Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1988). For an analysis of the practical and political differences between Hume’s empiricism and Kant’s moral idealism, see Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); John Danford, David Hume and the Problem of Reason (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 168; Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 306-07; and Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 34-38. There has been a continuing debate underway in Kantian scholarship for many years over the question whether the Critique of Pure Reason has a consistent, unified epistemological theme or represents multiple and contradictory patchwork of theories about the nature of knowledge. Some of the major representatives of the former position include H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience: A Commen­ tary on the First Half of the ‘Kritik der Reinen Vernunft,’ 2 vols. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936 and 1951), pp. 37-56, and A. C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason ’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938 and 1950), pp. 4-9 and 95-105. The patchwork thesis has been held by Hans Vaihinger, Die transcendentale Deduktion der Kategorien (Halle: Niemeyer, 1902) and Kommentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1922), pp. 42 ff.; Erich Adickes, Kants Lehre von der doppelten Affektion unseres Ich als Schlüssel zu seiner Erkenntnistheorie (Tübingen: Mohr Verlag, 1929); Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (Lon­ don: Macmillan, 1923); and Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the ‘Critique of Pure Reason ’ (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 81-84. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (Indianapolis, IN: Bob.bsMerrill Company, 1950), p. 8, and Prolegomena zu einerjeden künftigen Metaphysik, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1965), p. 6. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Empiricists (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1961), p. 312. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 330-31. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A 761, B 789, p. 607 and A 768, B 796, p. 611, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1956), pp. 694 and 700, respectively. Ibid., B xxiii, p. 25, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 23. Ibid., xiii, p. 22, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 19. One of the central issues underlying Kant’s epistemological work is the relationship between empirical real­ ism and transcendental idealism. Schopenhauer’s thesis is that Kant noticed a sub­ jectivistic and idealist imbalance between the two that forced him to write the second edition of the Critique. See Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant’s *Critique of Pure Reason,’ pp. 84-85 and 176; Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, pp. 7071; and Graham Bird, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of One Central

62

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Argument in the ‘Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Humanities Press, 1962),

9.

pp. 15-16. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, xviii, pp. 22-23, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p.

20. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

Heidegger develops the ontological dimension inherent in Kant’s epistemology. See George E. McCarthy, Romancing Antiquity: German Critique of the Enlightenment from Weber to Habermas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), pp. 83-130. The issue of the nature of sensations is somewhat confusing in Kant. Does sensa­ tion refer to the initial raw materials and indeterminate data and the corresponding changes in the state of consciousness caused by external influences on the mind or does the term sensation mean the formed intuitions and representations themselves? At times Kant refers to both meanings of the term. See Richard Aquila, Matter in Mind: A Study of Kant 's Transcendental Deduction (Bloomington: Indiana Univer­ sity Press, 1989), pp. 6-7, and Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, vol. 1, p. 97. Paton maintains that Kant refers to sensations as the matter or manifold of intuition. The forms of intuition are the a priori categories of time and space. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 69, p. 88, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 9091. Ibid., B 30, A 16, pp. 61-62, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 58-59. At the end of the introduction Kant argues that all knowledge comes from sensibility and the understanding. It has been noticed that a serious problem in Kant’s work lies in the apparent inconsistency with which he examines the relationship between sensibility and understanding, perception and experience, sensation and thought. At stake is the issue of the formation of the objectivity of synthetic consciousness. Are the objects derived from sensibility and then joined with the categories of the mind, or is the mind itself involved in the very creation of objectivity from the beginning? The important questions are whether the sensations and intuitions of appearances are autonomous and separate forms of data and knowledge; whether they apprehend objectivity directly and passively; or whether they are dependent on the understand­ ing, judgment, and thought. The central issues revolve around the constitutive na­ ture and epistemological range o f the imagination, the schematization, and the syn­ thetic unity of the mind. In Kant’s theory o f knowledge is perception prior to and independent of experience? See Arthur Schopenhauer, “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” in The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), pp. 438-446, and “Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie,” in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1, in Arthur Schopenhauer Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1949), pp. 51929. Representatives of the former position, who at times seem to emphasize a form of Kantian empiricism, phenomenalism, or realism in which the appearances as perceptions have an independent and objective reality to which concepts and rules are applied later, include: Kuno Fischer, A Commentary on Kant's Critick of the Pure Reason, volume 4 of The History of Modem Philosophy, trans. John Mahaffy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976); H. A. Prichard, Kant's Theory of Knowl­ edge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), pp. 27-28 and 136-39; Smith, A Commen­ tary to Kant's ‘Critique of Pure Reason ’; Bird, Kant's Theory of Knowledge, pp. 52-64 and his critique of Prichard, pp. 1-17; Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) and Kant’s Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity, pp. 31,72-75,94-96; Richard Aquila, Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 141-46 and Matter in Mind, pp. 2, 5, 17, 26; and

Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity

63

Wayne Waxman, Kant’s Model of the Mind: A New Interpretation of Transcenden­ tal Idealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 14-17 and 183-267. Representatives of the second and more idealist perspective, who argue that objects are constructed through the structures of the mind and imagination, include: Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 110; Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, vol. 1, pp. 93-98, 262-79, 336-47, 359-66; Ewing, A Short Com­ mentary on Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason, ’ p. 62; H. W. Cassirer, Kant’s First

Critique: An Appraisal of the Permanent Significance of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954), pp. 3 4 ,4 4 ,6 0 -6 1 ,6 7 ,7 7 -7 9 , and 83; Stephen Körner, Kant (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 37 and 54; C. D. Broad, Kant: An Introduction, ed. C. Lewy (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1978), pp. 73-74 and 81; Gordon Nagel, The Structure of Experience: Kant’s System of Principles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

1983), pp. 6-8 and 27-29; Stephen Houlgate, “Kant, Nietzsche, and the Thing in Itself,” Nietzsche Studien 22 (1993): 116-18; Dieter Henrich, The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Richard Velkley, trans. J. Edward et al. (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 153-55; and Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant, trans. Marshall Farrier (Albany: State University of New York, 1994), pp. 58 and 66-69. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 35, A 21, p. 66, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 64. Ibid., A 50, B 74, p. 92, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 94. Ibid., A 64, p. 101, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 105. Broad, Kant, p. 75 and Bird, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, p. 54. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, vol. 1, is even more descriptive about this process of understanding individual perceptions. “What is given to us is, for example, a color. We think that it is the color of a chair. Without thought, although we might see a color, we could not know that it was the color [sensation] of a chair, or indeed of anything. This is what Kant means when he says that “intuitions without concepts of thought are blind” (p. 96). Elsewhere Paton writes that to know a tree as a tree, thought must be present. Intuitions must be subsumed under categories o f sub­ stance and accident. To form an object— tree— both intuitions and thought must be given. To undertake a thought experiment in which there is an abstraction from objectivity and a separation of perception and thought, would result in a sensation of color and a concept of “treeness” without any determinate object (pp. 340-41). In The Unity of Reason Dieter Henrich quotes from a 1797 piece written by Kant: “What is an object? That whose representation is a complex of a number of predi­ cates appertaining to it....An object is that in whose representation various others [i.e., various elements] can be thought as synthetically combined” (p. 153). Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 85, p. 121, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 127. Ibid., A 86, p. 121, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 127. Ibid., B 126, p. 126, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 134. Ibid., A 97, p. 130, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 140. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, vol. 1, pp. 353-95. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 106, pp. 135-36, and Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 154-55. Cassirer, Kant’s First Critique, argues in agreement with Kant that the synthetic unity of consciousness is what provides the objectivity to sense percep­ tions (pp. 74 and 77-79). Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences, ed. and trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen

64

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Begriffsbildung: Eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaften

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 5th edition, 1929), and (Tübingen: Mohr Verlag, 1st edition, 1902). Other important early works of Rickert which examine these same issues include his dissertation Zur Lehre der Definition (1888), Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis (1892), “Zur Theorie der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung” (1894), and Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (1899). Wilhelm Windelband, “History and Natural Science,” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980): 165-85, and “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft,” Präludien 2 (1924): 136-60. See H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), pp. 192200; W illey’s discussion of Rickert in Back to Kant in which he emphasizes the break between the natural and historical sciences that is grounded in Windelband’s essay (p. 145); and H. H. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972), p. 87. Jürgen Habermas criticizes Rickert in Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) when he writes: “Rickert’s philoso­ phy of value itself subsists on the same ambivalence, which comes from not having completed the transition from Kant to Hegel. Rickert constructs the concept of culture primarily on the foundations of transcendental idealism. Like the category of nature, ‘culture’ has a transcendental meaning as the totality of phenomena in a system of prevailing values. It says nothing about objects, but determines the con­ ditions of the possible apprehension of objects” (p. 340, and Erkenntnis und Inter­ esse [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981], p. 202). Habermas is critical that Rickert has never moved beyond Kant’s critique of reason and has failed to develop a dialectical understanding of the nature of objectivity and intersubjectivity. Culture and history are understood as transcendental categories. There is no appre­ ciation of the internal logic, structure, or substance of these categories as socially and dialectically formed. In a later work, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry Stark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), Habermas briefly mentions Rickert’s epistemological presuppositions in the tran­ scendental constitution of the objects of experience and not the scientific problems per se (p. 14, and Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften: Materialien [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971], pp. 88). Here Habermas views Rickert’s philoso­ phy of social science from the perspective of Gadamerian hermeneutics and not Hegelian dialectics. For Habermas, the methodological problem of the objective validity of values remains. Rickert searched for the answer within the intersubjective values of the community, whereas Habermas looks to the formal and transcendental structures of communicative action. Weber tries to get around the problem entirely by postulating a theory of value freedom though he never sees this as an issue of hermeneutics (p. 15, and Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 88-89). This accounts for Habermas’s accusation that Weber is a positivist. For a general critique of Rickert, see Oakes, Weberand Rickert, chapter 4, pp. 111-44. Oakes also makes some interesting observations about Rickert’s theory of objective values and value universalism, and these, in turn, could be connected to Habermas’s theory of com­ municative ethics and communicative action (p. 108). Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation , p. 43, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 214, and 1902 edition, p. 245. Ibid., p. 54, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 227, and 1902 edition, p. 255. Heinrich Rickert, Science and History: A Critique of Positivist Epistemology, trans. George Reisman, ed. Arthur Goddard (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1962), pp. 30-39, and Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (Tübingen: J. C. B.

Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

65

Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1926), pp. 28-38. In this earlier work, Rickert simpli­ fies some of his major ideas about the differences between the natural sciences and the cultural sciences. He argues that reality is an infinite manifold of multiplicity in continuous flux and “inexhaustible differentiation.” Nothing is identical with any other thing. He refers to it as the “heterogeneous continuum” which is irrational (thing-in-itself) and thus cannot be conceptually grasped as a whole. Through a process of selection, simplification, reconstruction, and conceptual distinctions, individual, historical objects are formed. Two different forms o f selection and re­ construction of reality are possible: the homogeneous continuum exemplified in the procedures and logic of mathematics and the heterogeneous discretum o f the cul­ tural sciences. In this work Rickert uses the terms cultural sciences and historical sciences interchangeably. “As cultural sciences they are concerned with objects which are related to general cultural values and which can therefore be understood as meaningful; and as historical sciences they represent in its particularity and individuality the nonrecurring development of cultural events” (p. 99). Willey, Back to Kant, pp. 148-49. For a critique of Rickert’s epistemology and theory of historical objectivity, see Alfred Stem, The Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1962), p. 122. Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation, pp. 69-70, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 292, and 1902 edition, p. 323. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 3, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 3. Rickert’s language can be very confusing here because he apparently uses his philosophical terms somewhat indiscriminantly. However, a closer look reveals that the real problem lies in his switching from epistemological and formal methodologi­ cal questions to questions of material representation (source material and factual material). This is the difference between the form and material of concept formation and the representation of history. For example the term “perception” is used in both contexts with an entirely different meaning attached depending on whether Rickert is referring to perception as an epistemological or as a material category of conceptualization. In the former, it transforms the infinite manifold to form objects of experience, whereas in the latter it refers to reality as an infinitely diverse and irrational world of the manifold or source material (see pp. 51,70, and 78, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, pp. 224, 292-93, and 303, and 1902 edition, pp. 254,323-24, and 336-37). Historical facts are created from the diversity of perception. This is not the perception of neo-Kantian epistemology, but a “perception” that is synonymous with the manifold of experience. In truth, it should be characterized as a second order generality but Rickert intends instead to use it as the basis for his understanding of historical concepts. This is why Rickert contends that empirical perception cannot be represented. However, in his episte­ mology, perception is already a constructed reality. Empirical reality and the exist­ ence of phenomena are taken for granted. Rickert is not attempting to rewrite The Critique of Pure Reason, only to outline a critique of historical reason. This change does not express a contradiction but an issue o f style and presentation. When discussing the use of a method for forming historical categories, the manifold and perception are taken as given realities which need transformation. The emphasis is on historical perception and not the perception of everyday life. Rickert, The Limits o f Concept Formation, p. 74, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 297, and 1902 edition, p. 328. In his work, Science and History, Rickert writes, “The significance of a cultural event as such depends entirely on its own distinctive individuality” (p. 82, and Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, p. 80). Though this seems to indicate

66

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason that the significance of an event lies in the object as a manifestation and cultivation of the human spirit in history (pp. 101 and 136, and Kulturwissenschaft, pp. 99 and 32-33), significance and meaning as cultural values must ultimately lie, according to Rickert, with the transcendental subject as historian (p. 140, and Kulturwissenschaft, p. 137). The uniqueness and individuality o f cultural and historical events are deter­ mined by the value selection itself. But Rickert does express his notion of culture in problematic ways. Sometimes values seem to arise out of the various cultural mani­ festations in art, law, polity, economy, etc. and sometimes it comes out of the logic of inquiry. Whatever difficulty of expression Rickert may have, it is clear that his central focus is on the activity of the historian whose value relevance comes from the universally shared values of the community and its cultural expressions. Bruun in his work, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber's Methodology, contends that the values guiding the selection of objectivity reside in the object of investigation. This limits the nature of the scientific discussion (p. 91). From this perspective, history is just as empirical and scientific a discipline as the natural sciences. Also in this work, Rickert makes a clear distinction between the methodological and logical necessity of the principle of selection and reconstruction based on value selection and relevance to values, on the one hand, and the process of value judg­ ment and practical valuation on the other (p. 89, and Kulturwissenschaft, p. 87). Rickert offers the example of the French Revolution. There is general agreement that this is an important historical event for the history of Western Europe, even though, historians cannot take sides on whether this event is praiseworthy or not. “[Al­ though values] determine the point of view from which the historian theoretically contemplates the object, there can also be a difference in ‘emphasis,’ that is, in the importance given to the object in various historical accounts in which different cultural values are taken as the criterion of relevance.... Value serves as the criterion that determines the selection o f what is historically essential” (p. 91, and Kulturwissenschaft, p. 89). Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation, p. 88, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, pp. 321-22, and 1902 edition, p. 356. Rudolf Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 41; Guy Oakes, Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 94-96 and 102-10; and Fritz Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 42. Rickert, Science and History, p. 97, and Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, p. 95. Oakes, Weber and Rickert, p. 54. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Com­ munity, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 338. Ringer maintains that Rickert and Windelband rejected American and German forms of pragmatism (life philosophy) in the works of William James, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hans Vaihinger since they reduced knowledge to what is useful to life. Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation, p. 121, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 504, and 1902 edition, p. 559. Ibid., p. 124, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 508, and 1902 edition, p. 563. Ibid., p. 127, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 511, and 1902 edition, p. 567.

Neo-Kantian Epistemology and the Construction of Historical Objectivity 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

67

Rudolf Makkreel, “Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians: The Distinction o f the Geisteswissenschaften and the Kulturwissenschaften,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (1969): 423-44, and Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies, pp. 220-21; Max Horkheimer, “The Relation between Psychology and Sociology in the Work of Wilhelm Dilthey,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 8, no. 3 (1939): 430-43; and Karl-Otto Apel, “Dilthey’s Distinction between ‘Explanation’ and ‘Un­ derstanding’ and the Possibility of its ‘Mediation,’” Journal of the History of Phi­ losophy 25 (1987): 131-49. Rickert, The Limits o f Concept Formation , p. 145, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 540, and not in 1902 edition. Ibid., p. 152, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 553, and not in 1902 edition. Ibid., p. 159, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 560, and not in 1902 edition. Ibid., p. 170, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 578, and not in 1902 edition. Ibid., p. 207, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 658, and 1902 edition, pp. 642-43. Ibid., p. 214, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 666, and 1902 edition, p. 653. Rickert is critical o f both naturalism and idealism as adequate epistemological foundations for historical knowledge. He rejects the no­ tions of empirical objectivity and metaphysical objectivity. History cannot be con­ cerned with developing a theory of essential reality through a philosophy of history (Hegel) or the naturalistic laws of history (Comte). Neither metaphysics nor natural science can provide an adequate basis for an understanding of historical objectivity and the individuality and particularity of historical events. Later Weber will take up Rickert’s criticisms of Comte and Hegel and apply them to neo-classical economics and Marxism. Ibid., p. 216, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 673, and 1902 edition, pp. 660-61. Ibid., p. 220, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 678, and not in 1902 edition. Ibid., p. 232, and Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, p. 692, and not in 1902 edition.

2 Kantian Existentialism and the Warring Gods of Modernity: From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche Throughout the nineteenth century, the influence of Kantian epis­ temology on the development of German thought was as profound as it was pervasive. Through the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Lange, and Kuno Fischer, the philosophy of Kant was chan­ neled to Nietzsche, who, in turn, expanded upon and altered Kant’s theory of knowledge and moral philosophy.1 However, Nietzsche uses Kant in a very unorthodox manner in order to philosophize with a hammer in his attempt to destroy all formal systems of thought as forms of decadence and degeneration. Nietzsche takes the foun­ dations of German Idealism and proceeds to radicalize them in ex­ citing and unforeseen ways. From Kant’s critique of pure reason he develops his own theory of knowledge with its critique of episte­ mology and foundationalism, formulation of an alternate theory of perspectivism, and rejection of modern science, Enlightenment ra­ tionality, and positivism. He then transforms the critique of practical reason and moral philosophy into his theory of moral nihilism, the revaluation of all values, moral theory of eternal return, and the ex­ istential humanism of the will to power. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Weber incorporates many of these ideas into his own neo-Kantian anthropology and episte­ mology, suspicion of formal rationality and modem science, critique of empiricism, and philosophy of historical science. This is a fasci­ nating stretch in one line in the evolution of Kantian philosophy, beginning with epistemology and developing into existentialism, aesthetics, and the methodology of historical science. That is, be69

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ginning with his epistem ological theory of appearances (Erscheinungen) and the forms of intuition and understanding, Kant’s ideas are transformed into the almost unrecognizable forms of Schopenhauer’s existentialism with its world of will, striving, and suffering hidden by the veil of Maya, Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory of the Dionysian will of becoming and creative destruction and the Apollonian ideas of being and healing reason, and Weber’s method­ ological theory of the chaos of perception and the order of formal rationality and historical reason. Schopenhauer and Kant In 1813 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) published his doc­ toral dissertation from the University of Jena, entitled On the Four­ fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Writing later in the preface to the 1847 edition, he recognizes that the dissertation “be­ came the basis of [his] whole system.” In this early work he be­ moans the fact that a “clumsy charlatan” sophist like Hegel had re­ placed Kant as the central figure of German philosophy. Attempting to reestablish the luster of Kantian philosophy, he writes to a friend, “The whole of my exposition is but the full carrying out of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.”2 Schopenhauer begins to develop his own creative interpretations of Kant’s theory of knowledge and critique of pure reason. These ideas were continued later with the publica­ tion in 1818 of his philosophical masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation. In this work Kant’s epistemology is tied to Platonic idealism and Hindu asceticism to form an unusual philosophy of exis­ tentialism and the human condition. Nietzsche borrows heavily from this work as he incorporates into his own writings Schopenhauer’s theory of representation (Vorstellung) and skepticism about the value of sci­ ence, as well as his theory of will and resignation in the face of the meaninglessness of the world. Kantian existentialism and pessimism will later pervade Weber’s theory of rationalization. The dissertation represents an articulation of the principle of sufficient reason and is a direct assault on what Schopenhauer perceives as the epistemologi­ cal weaknesses of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This insight will later be the focus of the appendix to The World as Will and Represen­ tation? Sufficient reason provides the a priori and transcendental grounding of experience, knowledge, and becoming (time and the law of causality) in sensibility and understanding. It examines the intelligible factors that underlie the perceived reality.

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The dissertation accepts the fundamental premise of Kant’s theory of pure reason that the real world is represented in consciousness. Schopenhauer quotes Kant: “If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of this subject’s representation.”4 Schopenhauer focuses on the transcendental subject as the foundation for the representa­ tion of empirical reality in appearances. While emphasizing the form­ ative and trans-form-ative process of consciousness through the rep­ resentation of reality in intuitive perception (Anschauung), he rejects any remnants of metaphysical realism or dualism. Without the sub­ ject, there is no object. By pushing the Kantian critique of empiri­ cism to its metaphysical limits and, thus beyond Kant himself, he maintains that “all objective existence is at once abolished.”5 There is no autonomous, objective reality existing ready for perception or scientific inquiry. (A similar idea will be articulated later in Ameri­ can pragmatism by Willard Quine and Richard Rorty as they, too, reject the possibility of an independent or God’s-eye-view of the world.) Where German idealism saw a dialectic between the subject and object in terms of the thing-in-itself and the manifold of experi­ ence, Schopenhauer returns to an earlier and simpler form of ideal­ ism in his reduction of the latter to the former. The dialectic is no longer between representation and reality, but rather between repre­ sentation and the subject. The question of the objective validity of transcendental concepts has been replaced by an analysis of tran­ scendental consciousness. By maintaining a dualism between con­ cepts and sensation, Kant had raised the important question of the adequacy of concepts to reality. This question disappears, along with the dualism between subject and object, when the object as an inde­ pendent thing-in-itself disappears in the appearance itself. Summarizing his dissertation, Schopenhauer writes, “The four laws of our cognitive faculty, whose common expression is the principle of sufficient reason or ground, are declared through their common character and by the fact that all objects of the subject are allotted to them, as established by one and the same primary quality and inner peculiarity of our cognitive faculty, a faculty that appears as sensi­ bility, understanding, and power of reason (Vernunft).”6 The objec­ tive world is constituted through our subjective representations which condition our knowledge in four ways. There are four a priori grounds to our cognitive faculty or four forms of the principle of sufficient

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reason along with four types of objects corresponding to these as­ pects of the conscious mind: sensibility (sensations and being), un­ derstanding (causality and becoming), reason (abstract concepts and knowledge), and will (the law of m otivation and action). Schopenhauer undertakes in this early work to praise Kant’s Tran­ scendental Aesthetic and his theory of time and space as a priori forms of perception in the Critique of Pure Reason. However, he is just as quick to reject Kant’s Transcendental Analytic and the vari­ ous epistemological theories contained therein, including his doc­ trine of categories, his theory of perception and understanding, his failure to distinguish between sensations and perception, his tran­ scendental idealism containing empirical realism, his theory of the grounding of objectivity in both subjective representations and the thing-in-itself, the dualism between representations and their objects, his blending of idealism and realism, and his blurring of the distinc­ tions between perception and judgment or thought. Although Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant is relatively brief in this work, it does offer us a focused insight into his main criticisms of the latter’s epistemological writings. At its most basic level, he argues that, contrary to Kant, perception (experience) must neces­ sarily involve both sensation and understanding. This means that perception cannot be the result simply of the senses but must also involve the intellect and thought. Outlining the fundamental prin­ ciples of pure reason in the history of Western thought from Plato, Aristotle, and Sextus Empiricus to Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff, Hume, and Kant, Schopenhauer prepares the reader for his more radical twist on a timely subject. Objectivity refers to the re-presen­ tation of objects in consciousness mediated by the forms of sensibil­ ity (time and space) and the understanding (law of causality). Schopenhauer retains causality as the only form of the understand­ ing which integrates space and time within an objective world of changing states and relationships.7 These forms rearrange the raw material and feelings of sensation and constitute the organizing prin­ ciple of sufficient reason. By this means our experience of the ob­ jective world is produced, since nothing objective can be found in the unformed and meaningless sensations; by means of our inner sense of the successive flow of time, our outer sense of spatial rela­ tionships, and our understanding of causality as the condition of becoming and change, we conceptualize our impressions in direct and intuitive perceptions of the world. “The understanding first ere-

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ates and produces this objective external world out of the raw mate­ rial of a few sensations in the organs of sense.”8 According to Schopenhauer, Kant viewed the understanding as a faculty of thinking using concepts quite separate from the act of perception and the formation of objects. Schopenhauer instead ar­ gues that the sensations are purely subjective and particular feelings that do not direct consciousness beyond themselves. They are merely the subjective affection or stimulation of nerve endings on the sur­ face of the skin and become objective through the intervention of the understanding which sees them in terms of an external and ob­ jective cause and subjective sense effect. “For only by this opera­ tion and consequently in the understanding and for the understand­ ing does the real, objective, corporeal world, filling space in three dimensions, present itself.”9 Schopenhauer maintains that when we touch a table we get certain feelings, but only when the mind rein­ terprets these raw impressions into a coherent whole are we able to say that the table is an object which is solid, impenetrable, and hard. Consciousness constitutes the objects of experience. Another ex­ ample used by Schopenhauer is the act of gazing at the stars. It is the subject, who through intellectual perception, gives order, shape, size, distance, and consistency to the objects. Understanding is the uni­ versal and necessary prerequisite to objectivity. “The understanding converts the sensation into intuitive perception.”10 Unfortunately for the critique of pure reason, according to Schopenhauer, Kant had a very confused and contradictory under­ standing of the a priori conditions of experience. And it is the confu­ sion over the relationship between the transcendental aesthetic and analytic, perception and the understanding (causality), that lies at the heart of much controversy within Kantian scholarship today.11 In this early examination of Kant in his doctoral dissertation, Schopenhauer writes that “according to Kant, the perception of ex­ ternal things in space precedes all application of the causal law, that therefore the causal law does not enter into perception as an element and condition thereof; for him mere sensation is at once percep­ tion.”12 Kant’s error in the section on the doctrine of elements was that the forms of intuition of time and space were placed in percep­ tion and the law of causality placed in reflection with the other dis­ tinct concepts of the mind. Sensing and understanding performed radically different functions of perception and knowing. In the Tran­ scendental Aesthetic, according to Schopenhauer, Kant maintained

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that perception does not require the understanding as it is purely sensuous and passive, not requiring thought. Thus, perception is reduced to mere sensation and never really explained. Providing a more adequate explanation for intuitive perception and the a priori foundations of knowledge becomes a key element in Schopenhauer’s life work.13 The World as Will and Representation starts with the unusual and provocative sentence, “The world is my representation.”14 There is a subtle shift in the Kantian notion of representation from the way the world appears to us in intuition to the way the world is subjec­ tively for us. The dichotomies articulated by Kant between subjec­ tivity and objectivity, between appearance and the thing-in-itself are replaced by a theory of subjective consciousness which has strong ties to Kant’s transcendental idealism, but also to Berkeley’s subjec­ tive idealism and Locke’s theory of perception and ideas.15 In his discussions about the nature of knowledge, Kant maintained, as we have seen in chapter 1, that the imagination and understanding inte­ grated the manifold of intuition and the forms of the mind into a unified object of experience. With Schopenhauer the equal weight given by Kant in the formation of the appearances to the data of an external manifold and the forms of subjective consciousness is re­ placed by an emphasis on subjectivity alone. Kant held that knowl­ edge was a synthetic process of the integration of external and inter­ nal elements, whereas Schopenhauer drops the external to the point where he argues that in our claims about knowledge of the sun or the earth, we really know only the representations, as phantoms, in our consciousness of this world. “Everything that exists for knowl­ edge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation.”16 We never get beyond our own consciousness as we re-present the world to ourselves in perception. What we know is not the reality of the world but only our perception of it. And because we only see ourselves, we live in a world of deceptions and illusions. What for Kant was the basis for universal experience and absolute knowl­ edge of the Newtonian universe becomes for Schopenhauer simply forms of a dreamlike world of shadows and mystery. The world of unified rules and coherent principles subsumed under logical forms and mental categories in a transcendental subject disappears into an epistemological void in which there is no permanence, order, or meaning. Perception no longer becomes the occasion for science,

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but becomes a trembling force before an existence without substance or purpose. Schopenhauer begins The World as Will and Representation by accepting many of Kant’s basic ideas from the Critique o f Pure Rea­ son, including his theory of the phenomena and thing-in-itself, the transcendental aesthetic and the a priori forms of sensibility of time and space, intuition and the understanding, and the role of the a priori structure and universal forms of the human mind in the consti­ tution of human experience. He deviates from Kant by modifying his theory of perception and knowledge, by reducing the twelve a priori categories of the understanding to causality only, by seeing matter or substance as simply changes in cause and effect, by ex­ panding the nature of perception to include the understanding thereby integrating sensibility and thought, and by restricting the function of reason and reflection in concept form ation.17 “Kant’s great mistake...[was] that he did not properly separate knowledge of per­ ception from abstract knowledge: from this arose a terrible confu­ sion...”18 Schopenhauer distinguishes between the representations of perception in time and space and abstract concepts, between per­ ception and thinking and reflection (universal categories). He reduces abstractions and almost all of Kant’s categories of the understanding to abstract and nominalist concepts of utility, thereby returning to the empiricist tradition of John Locke.19 Schopenhauer rejects the independent existence of sensations and impressions from a priori thought and turns to integrate them. Per­ ception requires the understanding and its concept of causality to form and condition the objects of nature. Thought is absolutely nec­ essary for the formation of representations from sensations. In the preface to his work, he advises the reader that the proper introduc­ tion does not appear in the work itself but was written five years earlier as his doctoral dissertation on Kant and the principle of sufficient reason. It is this which must be read first in order to appreciate his later discussions on the nature of will and repre­ sentation. Another important addition to Kantian scholarship was the essay added in 1844 as the appendix to the second edition of The World as Will and Representation, entitled “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy.” These two works reveal the Kantian ori­ gins of Schopenhauer’s existentialism and how the forms of pure reason turn from providing the universal laws of nature into creating the deceptive veil of Maya.

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For many including Nietzsche, Schopenhauer offers an interest­ ing and elegant overview of Kant’s critique of theoretical and prac­ tical reason. Schopenhauer explicitly states that Kant remains the necessary foundation to his thinking on impressions and representa­ tions, but that there are serious problems in his analysis of them. “Kant’s greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect, and that on this account they cannot be known according to what they may be in themselves.”20 This origi­ nal insight found in Locke’s distinction between primary and sec­ ondary qualities is the heart of Kant’s theory of knowledge. The secondary qualities of color, sight, sound, etc. are the product of perception, whereas the primary qualities of extension, shape, solid­ ity, and mobility are the manifestation of the objective thing-in-it­ self. Kant would later deny the knowability of true being or the thingin-itself and transform both the primary and secondary qualities into phenomena of perception. Philosophy and science can never pen­ etrate to a knowledge of the inner reality of the object or the subject. For Schopenhauer, instead, the critique of the principles of pure or sufficient reason is a critique of ancient and modern realism, as he rejects the traditional acceptance of knowledge of being, truth, and causal laws—metaphysics, epistemology, and science. They are, for him, an “unstable and insubstantial dream.” The critical method ex­ amines the a priori conditions of perception lying in time, space, and causality. Schopenhauer also directs his attention to Kant’s cri­ tique of practical reason as he, too, applauds the latter’s defense of the life and dignity of human beings. By freeing ethics from experi­ ence and happiness, and by defining morality in terms of genuine virtue and the imperatives of the will of the self-legislator, he rejects the indifference of practical reason articulated by the empiricists. But he is also aware of the weaknesses of Kant’s arguments, espe­ cially the abstract formalism and egoism of his moral philosophy. Schopenhauer sees himself as the first philosopher to tackle seri­ ously and extend Kant’s works since they first appeared in the eigh­ teenth century. In an interesting development, Schopenhauer maintains that while the distinction between phenomena and the thing-in-itself is Kant’s most important contribution to philosophy, it was Plato who first expressed this position. The world of the senses is in a state of con­ stant change and ceaseless becoming, and knowledge of it is a mere

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flickering illusion. He likens this position to the reflections on the wall of Plato’s cave. The appearances of the phenomenal world are another example of this same illusory knowledge of the shadows of the senses. By stressing the subjective component of experience and rejecting the objective reality of mental constructs, Schopenhauer argues that the appearances are discontinuous distortions and delu­ sions. He also likens the phenomenal world to the deceptions and dreams of the veil of Maya found in Hinduism. This veil surround­ ing consciousness produces continuously changing illusions about the world which never comprehends objective reality. The thing-initself or true being is accessible only through mythical and poetic consciousness. The Hindu Vedas and Upanishads along with Plato’s Republic, that is, ancient Sanskrit literature and Greek philosophy, supplement Kantian epistemology and push beyond the limits of German critical theory. Schopenhauer understands Kant’s critique of pure reason as both an epistemological and an ontological argu­ ment about the nature of knowledge and being. And with these in­ sights the power of reason to relate to empirical reality is truncated. With this eclipse of reason, the subject becomes more indifferent to the world around it since it is no longer capable of understanding or transforming it. It was Kant who presented clearly and analytically this dreamlike world of the appearances and the faculty of pure reason. The uni­ versal laws of nature and the logical principles by which we orga­ nize experience and science are not reflections of reality but merely illusory aspects of the dreams of consciousness. “These laws cannot be our guiding line when we come to the explanation of the exist­ ence of the world and of ourselves.”21 Unlike the philosophers of Western civilization who believed them to reflect universal truth and absolute laws {aeternae veritates), Schopenhauer contends that these laws of sufficient reason are relative, inconstant reflections of chang­ ing appearances and unstable becoming. The empirical world is not a product of natural laws and essential truths, but rather the result of the structure of subjective consciousness. Humans do not know the actuality or potentiality of reality, the essence of existence, but only the contingent forms of their own intellect. Schopenhauer likens the dogmatic search for metaphysical reality and essential nature in ideas or impressions to a “squirrel in his wheel.” The animal, like the ra­ tionalists and empiricists, never realizes it is locked in an unnatural cage but accepts it as real and never moves beyond it, as it spends its

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whole life trying to outrun it. Kant’s critical theory attempts to show how the claims of eternal truth and being of the dogmatists are prod­ ucts of the human mind in its perception and apprehension of the world. Schopenhauer’s theory of representations rejects Kant’s bal­ ance between consciousness and objectivity and instead places the emphasis on the subjective construction of phenomenal experience. It will take the work of Nietzsche to draw the full implications of this rethinking of Kant as he develops his Kantian theories of epistemo­ logical perspectivism and the categorical will to power. Schopenhauer expands Kant’s ideas by beginning with his theory of knowledge and integrating it with the ontology of Maya and the Platonic Ideas. He reconstructs Kant’s critique of pure and practical reason by ap­ plying his epistemology to a theory of sufficient reason and the prac­ tical will. Contradictions in the Kantian Theory of Knowledge Although Schopenhauer praises the Critique of Pure Reason and accepts most of the ideas and insights found in the Transcendental Aesthetic with its analysis of the universal forms of perception (Wahrnehmung) and representation (Vorstellung) in time and space, he is very aware of the “contradictions and confusions” he sees in Kant’s deduction of the categories and concepts of the understand­ ing in the Transcendental Analytic.22 Schopenhauer takes Kant to task for simply identifying sensations and perception, offering no theory of the origins of perception, and separating the functions of perception and the understanding, perception and experience (sen­ suous knowledge). Sometimes Kant would make objectivity a func­ tion of perception and sometimes a function of the understanding. The fundamental question thus becomes: Are perceptions and un­ derstanding (thought) separate functions in the mind, or does per­ ception require the understanding to form the objects of empirical reality. According to Schopenhauer, Kant was suspiciously unclear and vague in his initial definition of basic concepts, such as intuition (Anschauung), perception, understanding, and reason (Vernunft). This does not portend well for the development of his later ideas in the work. He argues that, instead of clarity, “we found in Kant’s works only incoherent, inconsistent, inadequate, and incorrect ex­ pressions about these two faculties of the mind [understanding and reason].”23 He talked about the objects of experience but did not

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clarify whether the origin of these objects lay in the representations of perception or the categories of the mind. He criticizes Kant for not explaining how perception and the universal forms of knowl­ edge originate or how they are interrelated. What is the empirical content of perception; how is it formed from sensation; and how does it enter consciousness? What is the relation between percep­ tion and reflection? Schopenhauer blames Kant’s inability to raise these questions on the lack of clarity in his method, which was un­ able to distinguish the functions of perception and reason. He is also critical of Kant’s doctrine of the categories and the table of judg­ ments which provide the logical foundations for his theory of the concepts of the understanding and the universal principles of natu­ ral science. Thus the real criticisms of Kant are reserved for the fundamental inconsistencies and obscurities that Schopenhauer feels tear the Cri­ tique of Pure Reason apart. There is no clear distinguishing between reason and the understanding, and the latter notion is very fluid be­ tween the first and second editions of the work. Kant should have distinguished more carefully between concepts as a priori rules or transcendental principles of the mind and concepts as everyday, general abstract categories (house, flower, dog, justice, etc.). For example, Schopenhauer quotes passages from the Critique which argue that the understanding is the faculty of reflection, thinking, and judgment and that perception is a separate faculty which does not require thinking. In fact, perception does not require understand­ ing at all. On the other hand, he shows other places in the Transcen­ dental Analytic which justify an alternative reading of Kant’s episte­ mology. Here the understanding and its categories determine per­ ception and provide unity to experience. The manifold of represen­ tations is ordered by the unity of apperception and the understand­ ing. In this process objectivity and nature are formed. Schopenhauer contends that Kant built a systematic but compli­ cated machine out of the categories, transcendental unity of apper­ ception, synthesis of the imagination, schematism of the pure con­ cepts, and so forth. These ideas appear in the second edition of the book and Kant’s goal was to explain how the understanding aids in the construction of experience through abstract thinking. He thinks that the “secret motive” for the contradictions and obscurities lies in Kant’s fear of Locke and Berkeley, that is, lies in his fear of falling into either empiricism or idealism. The problem revolves around the

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thing-in-itself and the faculty of reason. There is a danger that if too much emphasis is placed on the subjective intellect (transcendental aesthetic) in the process of perception, then Kant could have fallen into a new form of idealism. If, however, he focused on the thing-initself as the direct cause of the object in sensation and perception, then there would be the other danger of empiricism. The architec­ tonic of the critical method was built as an attempt to avoid both. Schopenhauer sees Kant as having moved back and forth between the two positions and, in the process, having built complicated epis­ temological scenarios with limited success. Schopenhauer’s Reconstruction of Kant and the Primacy of the Subject Schopenhauer argues that Kant’s theory of knowledge must be systematically and methodically reconstructed to avoid the above mentioned contradictions and to uncover its hidden meaning. He numbers the ideas of the Transcendental Aesthetic among the “in­ contestable truths” of Western thought.24 He is also more partial to the idealism in this part of the Critique since it stresses the subjective foundations of perception in the consciousness of time and space. He proclaims in unison with Kant that there is no object without subject. The whole phenomenal world is created by the thinking subject without which it would disappear. Empirical perception or sensation is caused not by the thing-in-itself as Kant would argue, but by these very subjective conditions resting in the mind. Kant deduced the thing-in-itself from the law of causality and the nature of sensation; the thing-in-itself must have been the cause of the ob­ ject of sensation. However, Schopenhauer sees the cause in the a priori form of the intellect. Thus perception is simply representation. He argues that Kant later suppressed this idealism in the second edi­ tion, thereby creating the artificial structure and self-contradiction of the transcendental deduction of the categories. “In the second edition, he suppressed the principal idealistic passage...and declared himself directly opposed to Berkeley’s idealism. By doing this, how­ ever, he only introduced inconsistencies into his work...”25 It will be this very idealism of Schopenhauer that Nietzsche will push into nihilism and relativism. Schopenhauer’s epistemological reconstruction of Kant’s theory of perception, experience, understanding, and thought is complex since he combines elements of more than one component of know-

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ing. Schopenhauer recognizes that Kant distinguished between per­ ception and thought because he sometimes made the object depen­ dent on perception and sometimes on thinking and the categories of the understanding. This only adds to the confusion in Kant’s theory of knowledge. The crucial question is whether particular things or objective reality are formed in perception or thought. Schopenhauer takes a clear position on this issue when he contends that the objects are given only in empirical perception and that the common ele­ ments are thought indirectly through universal abstract concepts. “In perception itself empirical reality, and consequently experience, is already given, but perception can also come about only by the application of knowledge of the causal nexus, the sole function of the understanding, to the sensation of the senses. Accordingly, per­ ception is really intellectual, and this is just what Kant denies.”26 Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s doctrine of the twelve categories since causality is the only a priori concept of the understanding. The key point here is that perception is not to be distinguished from experi­ ence and the intellect because the understanding is involved from the beginning in the very act of perceiving objects. Pure reason is dismantled as the understanding is placed with perception and ex­ perience and abstract, universal concepts are kept in thought and reason. Now Schopenhauer, like Berkeley before him, moves to place Kant within the orbit of idealism when he argues that there is only representation and the thing-in-itself in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Difficulties develop in Kantian epistemology and modern philoso­ phy with the addition of the false idea of the object of the represen­ tation which could only refer to the unknowable thing-in-itself. For Schopenhauer, there is no object of representation, only representa­ tion itself. This problem arises because Kant never inquired into the nature of empirical perception. It was simply accepted as a given product of sensation and the forms of intuition (time and space). To discuss the nature of the object of perception is to discuss its cause, which, in turn, requires the application of the law of causality and the understanding. As we have already seen, Schopenhauer inter­ prets Kant as saying that the role of the understanding lies in thought and not in perception. The manifold of perception is integrated into a unity through the forms of perception and not the forms of the understanding. “Objects exist primarily only for perception and that concepts are always abstractions from this perception. Therefore

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abstract thinking must be conducted exactly according to the world present in perception...”27 By integrating perception and understand­ ing, Schopenhauer is making a distinction between a transcendental concept that integrates sensations into an object and empirical con­ cepts that facilitate abstract thought. The a priori conditions for em­ pirical perception lie in the forms of intuition and the law of causal­ ity (understanding). Here there is a transcendental integration of perception and thought. However, reflective knowledge and the pro­ cess of abstract reasoning using universal concepts are quite distinct for Schopenhauer and involve abstraction from the objects of per­ ception. So the understanding is involved in perception and is also quite distinct because Schopenhauer rejects the doctrine of the cat­ egories of the understanding as a groundless assumption, transfers the understanding and the concept of causality to perception, and separates perception from abstract thinking (universals). In so do­ ing, he believes he has resolved the internal contradictions of Kant’s theory of knowledge. From Subjective Idealism to the Ethics of Existentialism In reconstructing a theory of knowledge to avoid Kant’s confu­ sions and contradictions, Schopenhauer focuses on the epistemo­ logical issues of objectivity and the thing-in-itself. He has always been suspicious that the notion of the thing-in-itself was incorrectly deduced from the false idea of the object of representation. Instead, he believes that the thing-in-itself is derived from his search for the meaning behind representations and life, rather than from what lies behind the phenomena and laws of natural science. His response to the question is that it is the knowing subject that lies at the heart of phenomena and representation. However, this is not the Cartesian ghost in the machine, but a subject acting in the world. It is through the body that the subject perceives, acts, and manifests itself, and the body is a representation like every other object seen by the subject. The body is known in two ways: first, it is perceived as a physical object among other phenomena and, sec­ ond, it is intuited directly in a very special way as will. “Every true act of his will is also at once and inevitably a movement of his body; he cannot actually will the act without at the same time being aware that it appears as a movement of the body.”28 The world is thus known as both representation and will; there is no other reality knowable for us.

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Conscious and unconscious movement, motives, affections, and emotions of pleasure and pain of the body represent the concrete, physical expression and objectification of the will through various kinds of action.29 It is this direct knowledge of the body as the ob­ jectivity of the will in the form of action and impressions that Schopenhauer argues is the thing-in-itself, that is, the objective real­ ity which underlies all representation of the empirical world. This dual way of knowing the body as representation and will is the key to unraveling the inner reality of all phenomena in nature. Now Schopenhauer begins to turn to an analysis of the nature of will as a universal force or energy of nature that lies behind all physical real­ ity and experience.30 Just as he is critical of Kant’s epistemology and theory of pure reason, Schopenhauer is also critical of his critique of moral reason. He counts as absurd the Kantian position that the goal of a theory of practical reason is to parallel symmetrically the formalism, abstrac­ tion, and laws of pure reason. Virtuous action and the good are to conform to abstract maxims of duty and the logical rules of reason without regard to inclinations, emotions, or effects of the action. Schopenhauer contends, as did Plato before him, that virtue cannot be taught and that the search for moral principles and an ethical system which could change the moral character of the individual is an impossibility similar to searching for the mythical philosopher’s stone. Basing his moral philosophy on the “disguised egoism” of self-legislation and an “indifference” to the general will, Kant also built his system on a hidden inconsistency. There was a tendency to connect virtue and eudaemonism, morality and happiness even when the explicit logic of his argument demanded a morality based on formal rationality, duty, and virtue for its own sake. According to Schopenhauer, Kant was never able to see the full implications of his own a priori moral philosophy or its underlying weaknesses. Empirical reality has no true existence but is a nothingness or empty void—a shadow of constant becoming. Our knowledge of this world is based on sensation and perception and is mere opinion of fleeting copies of the true forms. Only the Ideas are real, and they are comprehended through the will-less contemplation of beauty and art. And it is in the harmony and melody of music that the will objec­ tifies itself and achieves the greatest insights into a reality that is beyond the capability of reason to articulate. Schopenhauer takes Kant’s Critique o f Practical Reason and transforms it into an exis-

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tential critique of practical reason and the categorical imperative. Virtue becomes a mechanism of renunciation and escape from the world. Through aesthetic perception we lose consciousness of our individual selves and our experiences. We become transported to the realm of beauty with the gaze of an aesthetic and disinterested consciousness.31 Through our contemplation of the Idea as the eter­ nal essence of beauty, we become a “pure, will-less, painless, time­ less, subject o f knowledge.”32 Since the essential being-in-itself of the phenomenal world is the will as striving and suffering, a virtu­ ous life should lead to the power of reason as aesthetic contempla­ tion over life, the complete renunciation of all striving, effort, and desire, and the self-mortification of the body. It should also lead to a rejection of servitude to the will, representation, and the principle of sufficient reason, and the mystical joining of the will-less knowing subject with nature and the eternal Platonic Forms or Ideas. In this aesthetic state there is a transcendence of normal self-consciousness with its subjectivity and interestedness in the world. In the perverse Kantian system, the quest for happiness only continues the search for virtue and the highest moral good in the world of the will. This locks us into the world of pain and suffering more firmly. On the other hand, the aesthetic quest for the Platonic Ideas, as unrealized patterns or essential ideals, leads to a contemplative and fulfilling life. These Ideas manifest themselves in the world of phenomena; they appear through the plurality of representations and becoming; and they are essential being or being-in-itself to which the subject must return by renouncing its will. They are the true being or ad­ equate objectivity of the will expressed in the plurality of phenom­ ena which themselves are only the delusions of Plato’s cave. Schopenhauer has integrated Kant’s doctrine of the thing-in-itself with Plato’s theory of Ideas. Kant created a world of phenomena organized around the ratio­ nal principles of the mind. In turn, this world was morally constructed upon the self-legislative capabilities of free individuals who formed their lives according to rational laws and abstract moral rules. Sci­ ence and morality formed a lawlike, rationally ordered universe. But this phenomenal world of illusory and deceptive appearances de­ scribed through categories of time, space, and causality—that is, through the categories of sufficient reason and modern science—is the veil of Maya which conceals the essence of reality. This thingin-itself of nature is the boundless energy which surges throughout

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the universe as unconscious will, and the phenomenal world is an expression of its own objectifications and appearances.33 Schopenhauer views the sole nature of the will as striving and the world of appearances as an irrational place of misery and pain dot­ ted by cries of loneliness and suffering. This is the affliction and reality of existence. The essence of will is striving, and all willing originates in a lack or want that can never be satisfied. The individual’s will-to-live pro­ duces a world of constant, unending striving, dissatisfaction, and discontentment. The goal of life is to want more and more. With ever increasing satisfaction of the will, there is also a greater sense of deficiency and inadequacy which forces the individual to pursue fruitlessly an ever-elusive satisfaction of these desires. This leads only to a vicious circle of further suffering and pain. Fulfillment and happiness are fleeting, desires and dissatisfaction are infinite, as is the emptiness and superficiality of existence. We are only beggars seeking satisfaction of our dreams and momentary release from our tragic misery. Every satisfaction is the beginning of a new discon­ tent. Religion attempts to conceal this by offering temporary respite and thoughtless optimism through its rituals and prayers. But these are “the charm[s] of delusion.” As Schopenhauer says, “Constant suffering is essential to all life.”34 Knowledge is secondary, an after­ thought, and offers the will only technical or instrumental choices of means to accomplish its self-defined end of continuous striving. Human rationality is not self-motivating or self-directing but is sub­ servient to the needs of the will and the necessities of fate and cau­ sality. However, all this changes, when, through aesthetic contem­ plation in the form of tragedy and music, we attain the Idea or es­ sence of the objectifications of the will. With the help of this con­ templation we leave behind the contradictory world of will, desires, and technical reason and attain a higher state of awareness and be­ ing through self-renunciation. We enter a realm of “peace that is higher than all reason, that ocean-like calmness of the spirit, that deep tranquility, that unshakable confidence and serenity.”35 When consciousness is concerned with the will’s endless search for happiness and pleasure and not the contemplation of objective reality and beauty, then there can only be unresolved and unremit­ ting dissatisfaction. This is the world of sufficient reason, the phe­ nomena of Maya, a world of delusions and dreams which can only be escaped by a rejection of utility and interests, a leaving behind of

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the desires of the will and the search for satisfaction in the flow of becoming. A forgetfulness of the world, the perception of the natu­ ral beauty of insignificant objects, a losing of individuality in per­ ception and thought, and disinterested and objective knowledge of aesthetic truths by the knowing subject provide the only ultimate release from the will. By these means aesthetic contemplation and spiritual peace are achieved. “The storm of passions, the pressure of desire and fear, and all the miseries of will are then at once calmed and appeased in a marvelous way.”36 This is a realm beyond happi­ ness and misery, beyond striving and the will; it is a realm of exalted beauty, sublime contentment, and eternal peace. To his theory of artistic beauty and the w ill-less subject, Schopenhauer adds a theory of the aesthetically sublime. This di­ mension of his understanding of the reality of existence is further underlined by his excursion into the asceticism and mysticism of Hindu philosophy. For this purpose he connects the Vedas and Upanishads with Kant’s Critique o f Pure Reason. Escape from the world of illusion begins with the recognition of the infinite greatness and hostile expanse of the universe. This understanding may have originally precipitated an existential crisis of the lonely nothingness and absurd meaninglessness of our existence. This is what Schopenhauer calls the “ghost of our own nothingness.”37 We are irrelevant and insecure spectators in a world beyond our compre­ hension and understanding. But by changing our attention and con­ centrating on the Kantian insights we realize that the world is only a representation of the pure knowing subject. The human mind is the precondition for its being which lessens its vastness and its threat to our security and peace of mind. By losing ourselves in this aware­ ness, we move beyond the fleeting particularity of time and space and the insecurity of our own life and individuality (principium individuationis) to a sublime and exalted peace of mind. As in Hindu philosophy, we become one with the world and are at home in it. The sublime and the beautiful are connected in a quote from Goethe, “Whoever beholds human beauty cannot be infected with evil; he feels in harmony with himself and the world.”38 The ultimate goal of knowledge is to recognize essential being, will as thing-in-itself, as the true reality of the inner self and the whole world, to sacrifice individuality and egoism, to escape the principium individuationis and the veil of Maya, to overcome the Enlightenment forms of sufficient reason and the phenomenal world

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of time and space, and to abandon life with its willing, suffering, and dreams of happiness and pleasure. Schopenhauer turns to Chris­ tian mysticism and Hindu asceticism for examples of this renuncia­ tion of existence and suffering, resignation and indifference before the nothingness of life, rejection of attachment to the hopes, vanity, and meaninglessness of the world, and pure will-less contemplation of eternal truth.39 Denying the will-to-live and its attendant dreams involves self-renunciation through mortification and control of the body and will, that is, a “complete indifference to the world of things.” This is the work of the saint or of the beautiful soul of the great artist. Pessimism and resignation free the individual from worldly concerns and attachment to life, thereby creating an inner cheerfulness and peace, and a noble and virtuous character. Lange and Kant Friedrich Lange (1828-1875) was another important philosopher who reintroduced the ideas of Immanuel Kant into the German acad­ emy in the 1860s, especially with the publication of his masterful work, The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Impor­ tance, in 1865. Through him and the neo-Kantians in Marburg and the Southwest School who followed, materialism and empiricism came under closer scrutiny and criticism. Lange was born in Wald bei Solingen, but later moved with his family to Switzerland where he began his university studies at the University of Zurich. He trans­ ferred to Bonn to complete his doctorate. He taught for two years in a Gymnasium in Köln and then returned to the University of Bonn as a Privatdozent, where he taught courses on education, sixteenthcentury thought, psychology, moral statistics, and the history of materialism. He got to know the philosophers Friedrich Überweg and Hermann von Helmholtz whose lectures on physiology he at­ tended at the university. He eventually left academics and through­ out the 1860s was secretary to the Chamber of Commerce at Duisburg and editor of the liberal daily newspaper, Rhein- und Ruhrzeitung. During this time he was writing The History of Materi­ alism and in 1865 also published The Worker Question in which he defended the rights of workers. He undertook the editorship of a new democratic newspaper in Winterthur in 1866. Also in that year he returned to teaching and became a Privatdozent at the University of Zurich and later was called to a professorship at the same institu­ tion. After six years he accepted a position at the University of

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Marburg where he lectured on philosophy, logic, and psychology, while continuing to rewrite and expand The History of Materialism until his death in 1875. In the first footnote to the second edition, Lange praises the Marburg neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen and his book, Kant's Theory of Experience (1871), as a major breakthrough in clarity and insight into Kant’s theory of knowledge. He acknowl­ edges his dependence on Cohen’s interpretation and his importance for rewriting the chapter on Kant and materialism. Lange’s major work reconstructs the history of Western material­ ism from the Greek atomism of Epicurus and Democritus, the sensa­ tionalism and relativity of the Sophist Protagoras and ethical materialism of Aristippos40 to the Roman philosophy of nature of Lucretius; he then outlines the decline of materialism in medieval Scholasticism with its Aristotelian criticisms and its later revival dur­ ing the scientific renaissance of Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Locke; finally, he traces in more detail the further development of materialism in the seventeenth-century works of Gassendi, Hobbes, and Boyle, the eighteenth-century writings of Newton and Hartley, and the eighteenth-century French materialism of Voltaire, Diderot, de la Mettrie, and d’Holbach. Kant is viewed as the intel­ lectual watershed in this development, since it was his new critical method which rejected materialism and reasserted the centrality of consciousness and the mind in experience. That is, consciousness was not reducible to the material world. Lange views Kant as mediating between two extreme and impor­ tant philosophical traditions: materialism and skepticism. Skepticism, as a form of idealism, begins with Protagoras, who according to Lange, marked a crucial turning point in Greek philosophy. By ar­ guing that the phenomenal world of experience is formed from our ideas, Protagoras redirected philosophical inquiry from nature and the object to the subject and consciousness. However, he began his study of knowledge, like Democritus, from sensation, but rejected the latter’s atomism. The essential in experience was always particu­ lar, individual, and constantly becoming, not the universal as it would be for Plato and Aristotle. This introduction of subjectivity and par­ ticularity into experience resulted, for him, in an epistemological and ethical relativism in which something is true or good as it affects the individual. Truth is the measure of how things appear to each individual in sensation. Man, and not some universal objective prin­ ciple or law, became the measure of all things and reality. The logic

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of this argument extends to judgment and thought. Since the same person can experience the temperature of a room as warm and at another moment as cold, both impressions are true. Thus the Soph­ ists argued that contradictory assertions may be true and false at the same time. It is the feelings and impressions which are true, not some objective standard. The Skeptics are led to reject the possibil­ ity of absolute truth and the validity of universal knowledge. Protagoras did not draw the ethical implications that flowed from his own arguments, since he accepted the prevailing moral values and traditions of the Athenian polis. However, others have; and his thoughts have led to the belief that issues of moral right and wrong are simply a matter of the individual taste of the moment. Later, Aristippos, a student of Socrates, would argue that the good of hu­ man life is sensual pleasure and not philosophical contemplation or virtuous activity. The most developed form of the skeptical position with its rejec­ tion of universal truth and distrust of objective moral standards was continued by the eighteenth-century materialist, David Hume. Lange views both Protagoras and Hume as precursors to Kant. Hume re­ jected all forms of metaphysics and the rational justification of the principle of cause and effect. The concept of causality connotes that for every object there must be something else thought which is its cause. Hume argued that reason itself is incapable of justifying the notion of causality in an a priori fashion, that is, incapable of justify­ ing it independently of experience. For him, “the concept was noth­ ing but the bastard offspring of the imagination, impregnated by experience, and so bringing certain representations under the law of association.”41 It contains only subjective necessity and resulted from common experience and custom. By arguing in this way, Hume con­ tended that metaphysics, or the independence of reason to establish its own ideas, is impossible. There is no objective validity to the concepts of reason since it is only a nominalist product of the cre­ ative imagination. As we have seen in the first chapter of this book, Kant rejected this argument of Hume, but was impressed by his analysis and rea­ soning. In the Critique of Pure Reason he turned to an investigation of the faculty and principles of pure reason in order to determine the possibility of a priori concepts, the objective validity and applicabil­ ity of concepts to the world, the relation between thought and per­ ception, and the critique of metaphysics and the supernatural. Kant’s

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answer to Hume was based on his discovery of the doctrine of the categories, that is, that there are a priori concepts, but their existence becomes possible only when applied to the world of the senses. They have no validity or existence on their own. This provided Kant with the basis for his critique of metaphysics and his justification for epis­ temology. A priori reason is not capable of justifying a supernatural world, but it is capable of showing that categories such as cause and effect are the product of pure reason, applicable only to experience. By rejecting the materialism of Hume, Kant showed a close inti­ macy between thought and perception, consciousness and experi­ ence. Lange summarizes Kant’s critical theory by saying, “It is the view that man’s experience is a product of certain fundamental ideas, the whole import of which lies in this fact, that they do determine experience.”42 Quoting from the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Lange sees Kant attempting to resolve the riddle of experience. The ideal­ ists, from ancient Greece to Leibniz and Berkeley, argued that expe­ rience is simply an appearance of the ideas of pure reason and the understanding. On the other hand, the empiricists argued that truth is a reflection or correspondence between ideas and empirical real­ ity. Kant weaved his way between the two by contending that all truth derives from experience, but that the appearances are formed with the aid of the faculty of reason and forms of the understanding. “Before a thing can have really become a thing to him, it must have modelled itself upon his ideas.”43 The Kantian Revolution in episte­ mology maintained the importance of sensation and experience, but rejected the belief that knowledge rests solely with the senses. It stressed that the world of experience also conforms to the universal structure and forms of the human mind. According to Lange, the riddle is solved by a critical examination of the laws of experience and consciousness. As George Stack writes in his book, Lange and Nietzsche: “Lange is at pains to understand Kant’s theory of knowl­ edge as leading to a form of subjectivism. Even though such an interpretation is hardly idiosyncratic, this kind of emphasis will have considerable impact on Nietzsche.”44 Nietzsche follows Lange with his conventionalist view of science, perspectival view of knowledge, and relativist view of truth. We can never know things as they really are but only as filtered through the laws of reason and the forms of the mind. Access to the latter begins with a discussion of the nature of the intellect outside of

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sensuous and empirical experience—pure reason—and its forms of abstract knowledge in analytical and synthetic judgments. What could reason know by itself independent of other forms of knowledge? Does it have valid universal and necessary a priori knowledge? These questions direct Kant to turn to mathematics as just such a kind of knowledge which could give us insight into the structure of the fac­ ulty of reason. To accomplish this, Kant looked at the nature of judg­ ments. For him, there can be analytical, synthetic, a posteriori, and a priori judgments. These are variations and more developed forms of Hume’s distinction between ideas and matters of fact. Briefly, an analytical judgment is a logical tautology in which the predicate of a proposition is already included in the subject as in the sentence, “All bodies are extended.” Nothing new is learned or added to our knowl­ edge of the world, since the notion of body already includes within it the notion of extension. A synthetic judgment increases our knowl­ edge by broadening our experience of the world. A posteriori knowl­ edge comes from contingent experience and judgments about the nature of the world. A priori judgments are necessary and universal judgments formed prior to experience. Since Kant wished to justify the universality and necessity of natural science, he was interested in establishing that science contains both a priori and synthetic judg­ ments. Science is based on experience and expands our knowledge of the world; at the same time it is both logically necessary and uni­ versally applicable—that is, it is not deduced from experience (a posteriori) but contains a priori reasoning. The intelligibility of the world lies not in the customary associa­ tion and arrangement of causal connections but in natural laws pro­ duced by reason. Therefore, Kant asked the question: How are a priori synthetic judgments possible? His answer comes in the form of mathematics and natural science. He argued against Hume that mathematics contains judgments that are both synthetic and a priori. They expand our knowledge of the world but are not confirmed by the world. This leads us into the Transcendental Aesthetic and Kant’s analysis of mathematics, intuition, time, and space. According to him, the mathematical relation 7+5=12 is derived from intuition or the senses and is thus synthetic. But it also has an a priori element contained in it, since its confirmation, as well as its independent application, is not determined by experience. We know that 7+5=12 is universally applicable and valid in measurements and weighing to a broad range of objects in nature. At this point in his analysis,

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Lange summarizes the lively debate about a theory of mathematics taken from the works of Hume, Herschel, and John Stuart Mill. These empiricists argued that the rules and axioms of mathematics are the result of definitions, inferences, and generalizations from experi­ ence. From their perspective Kant’s claim for the a priori necessity of mathematics is false, since mathematics rests only on induction and generalization. Mathematical judgments are hypothetical and synthetic. There are a priori judgments but they are analytical in nature, based on the identity between subject and predicate. Ultimately, Lange rejects these criticisms as invalid and, like Kant, argues that, just as in mathematics, there are a priori elements in our knowledge of the world. He provides an example of a spotted tele­ scope which when directed at the sky produces spotted images. The glass in the telescope was apparently dirty and produced these ef­ fects. However, when directed at the landscape the spots disappeared. Lange contends that he was wrong when he attributed spots to the telescope since they disappeared when looking in another direction. In spite of this, he believes he is still able to attribute necessity to his judgments about the sky though he may be wrong about the spots. He recognizes that there may be physiological mistakes regarding the nature of the psycho-physical constitution of the mind and thus mistakes about the specific types of a priori knowledge. Kant was correct about the subjective nature of experience, though his analy­ sis of mathematics, the categories, and laws of physics may have been faulty. Elements of Newtonian physics were being called into question during Lange’s lifetime; geometric proofs were being justi­ fied and derived through experience and induction (Überweg and Mill); arithmetical propositions were seen as analytical and not syn­ thetic (Zimmerman); mathematics was being considered as an intuitionless, intellectual exercise; and some a priori ideas were be­ ing viewed as contingent delusions not rooted in human nature (Mill). Lange rejects these arguments and holds steadfast to Kant’s theory of mathematics grounded in the intuition and senses; he reasserts their synthetic and a priori nature. However, he recognizes that Kant had come under serious attack and that in the future he may not be easily defended. These issues may be reargued in the future, but whatever turns may be taken in mathematics and science to dis­ prove Kant, what is ultimately not in doubt is that necessity and universality lie in the subject; they are produced by the faculty of reason, whatever may be understood by that faculty.

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Lange rejects the empiricist view of experience as one-dimen­ sional. For him, experience is a phenomenal form of knowledge of the appearances in which the senses are integrated with the under­ standing. We never know what things are really like; we only know how they appear to us mediated by the forms of intuition, that is, by time and space. He offers an example of the vibrations of a string and the resulting tone heard by an individual. It is the physiological or psychological condition of humans that is the a priori basis for hearing the tones and notes from the movement of the string. Just as we transform physical movement into sound, we also are capable of transforming intuitions into experience by means of the “organiza­ tion of our thinking.” To accomplish this, Kant deduces the validity of the a priori elements by abstracting from the empirical aspects in intuition and experience. He raises the question: What are the uni­ versal and necessary conditions for the possibility of experience? Lange maintains that Kant was still very much a metaphysician, since he continued to separate the analytic from the aesthetic, un­ derstanding from sensibility, thought from senses. The senses re­ mained passive, whereas the understanding provided the synthesis and spontaneity for the creation of things from impressions. Lange disputes this, as did Schopenhauer earlier in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle o f Sufficient Reason. He argues that the category of substance is a product of a sensuous synthesis and integration of the impressions into a thing. He stresses that this critical approach relies upon a transcendental method and not an empirical psychology, though it does clearly have a physical and psychological dimension in terms of the a priori organization of the mind. The senses and the laws of the understanding are equally valid forms of knowing phe­ nomena. But, in the end, all knowledge must be grounded in the content of the sensuous intuitions and the forms of space, time, and the categories. “Sensibility realizes the understanding.”45 Thus the difference between the physical and intellectual is not as great as previously thought. Lange is emphatic in his stress on the fact that only the phenomenal world of things can be known and that beyond that, that is, the thing-in-itself, everything is an unknowable, inarticulable, and meaningless chimera. Lange retains his most critical remarks until the end with his analy­ sis of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories from the single principle of Aristotle’s table of judgments. This he views as the basic flaw in Kant’s critique of pure reason. From the primary

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forms of judgment in logic, Kant thought he could deduce the corre­ sponding logical categories of the mind that produced experience. But this is metaphysical reason in search of the primary forms of judgment and their justification. Under the headings of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, he was laboring heavily under the weight of pure speculative reason. Lange, borrowing from Cohen’s work, still appreciates that beneath this “new metaphysic” of Ger­ man scholasticism and formal logic lies an important truth. Rather than relying on a metaphysical critique, he emphasizes another ele­ ment in his work—the transcendental critique, which argues not from the table of judgments but from the a priori conditions for the possi­ bility of synthetic knowledge. By this method he could arrive at the true a priori structure of both our experience and abstract thought. Finally, Lange looks at Kant’s Critique o f Practical Reason and doctrine of the freedom of the will. Here, too, Kant had created an­ other metaphysical dilemma. If the phenomenal world is organized around the principles and laws of sensibility and the understanding, and if this is a Newtonian universe of scientific determinism and causal laws of nature, then where is there room for free will? Lange responds that Kant established the applicability of pure reason in a metaphysical fashion beyond experience by creating a new intellec­ tual world of practical freedom that is not justifiable. In spite of this inability to ground practical reason, Lange accepts the basic fea­ tures of Kant’s moral philosophy. Moral obligation and the uncondi­ tional laws of practical reason lie within the subject. Suspicious of the justification and “mystic background” of practical reason in moral duty, Lange continues to support Kant’s major insight that moral law is grounded in human consciousness. He believes, however, that Kant confused the phenomenal and the noumenal (intellectual) worlds and that he apparently subverted his crucial distinction be­ tween phenomena and thing-in-itself. According to Lange, the a priori of moral duty blends together theoretical and practical reason, a priori necessity and certainty, and the moral will. Freedom is not possible within a Newtonian universe of causal laws and physiological and psychological determinism. From this perspective, we are marionettes and automatons in a universe in which everything is determined through cause and effect. Therefore, practical reason has created an imaginary and illusory world of freedom that lies beyond experi­ ence and science but is still applicable to the real world. Phenomena and the thing-in-itself become bonded in a disturbing way which

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calls into question Kant’s whole philosophical system. From another perspective, we are rational and free beings. We find ourselves caught between “mere mechanicalness” and “exalted earnestness.”46 Lange recognizes that this connection between the thing-in-itself and phenomena is a position accepted by materialists. The inability to justify the distinction between pure and practical reason, as well as the connection between a deterministic and mechanical world of phenomena and a free intellectual world, undermines the doctrine of freedom as a philosophical system built on a mystical dream and fantasy world. Kant was caught in a contradiction between life and ideals, phenomena and noumena. Lange recognizes that the next logical step lies in Schopenhauer’s argument that the will is the thingin-itself. Kant’s real problem was that he was caught between two worlds: that of scholastic rationalism and that of German poetry. His moral philosophy taught of the possibilities of human beings able to rise above themselves, morally define their existence, and determine their lives. Lange describes Kant’s work in noble and uplifting terms— he is a “teacher of the ideal,” a poet of heroic effort and lofty values, who is able to kindle the passions of the young with a new German spirit of freedom, nobility, and honor. Like Schiller, he has moved beyond the limits of reason and science to a stirring of the soul of an age; he has taught his countrymen to dream. He has joined together science and poetry, and this has been made possible because both deal only with the appearances. Fischer and Kant In 1866 Kuno Fischer published a concise, readable introduction to Kant’s Critique o f Pure Reason that was available to Nietzsche.47 Unlike the works of both Schopenhauer and Lange, this was a more straightforward and precise analysis of both the Transcendental Aes­ thetic and Analytic with a central focus on the issue of objectivity in sensuous phenomena and reflective concepts. Fischer outlines the basic structural features of Kant’s theory of objectivity in both per­ ception and experience, intuition and judgment. As with the two other interpreters of Kant, Fischer, too, stresses the importance of subjective consciousness in the process of knowing empirical real­ ity. Knowledge of the world is possible because intuition and per­ ception provide the transcendental conditions for its sensuous rep­ resentation. In sensible intuition, the sensations (individual impres­ sions) are united with the pure forms of intuition—time and space—

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that organize and create the external objects of perception within spatial and temporal representations. A phenomenal world of sensible representations of individual objects or appearances, such as a stone, the sun, metal, man, etc., is constructed. Time and space are not themselves part of the sensa­ tions but represent the transcendental conditions for the possibility of perception. They are the principles of individuation {principium individuationis) through which objects are located in the here and now. Without these subjective conditions of consciousness, percep­ tion of the world is impossible. They are products of pure reason. “Without space and time, our representations would be a chaos, in which the greater part could never be distinguished.”48 The mani­ fold or chaos of the sensations must be incorporated in the form of space and time in order to appear as an intuition or representation. “Sensation gives the sensuous content; intuition adds the form of the representation; the combination of both forms the sensuous rep­ resentation, or phenomena ”49 The pure forms of intuition are not general concepts derived by an abstraction from perceptions in time and space, but are a priori synthetic judgments which in their pure form are geometry and arithmetic. Fischer argues that they cannot be deduced from empirical intuitions or sensuous perceptions; they are original intuitions that are the transcendental conditions for per­ ception. The transcendental concepts are part of the structure of the mind which organizes thought around the pure categories of the under­ standing, including cause and effect, substance and accident, exist­ ence and possibility, and plurality and unity. The categories struc­ ture the objects of experience and our understanding of the world of nature. Where intuitions are immediate representations of nature, the understanding creates “mediate representations” which are inte­ grated through concepts and rational relationships. Fischer repeats the famous Kantian line: “Intuitions without concepts are blind; con­ cepts without intuitions are void”50 The aesthetic and analytic rep­ resent distinct functions of the mind—one the faculty of sensibility and the other the faculty of the understanding which in turn produce two different types of objects—immediate objects of intuition and mediated objects of thought.51 A clear distinction is made between immediate intuitions in per­ ception and mediated thought through concepts in thinking. The former provides us with the individual object of the sun, while thought

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makes judgments about causal relationships in order to offer the conclusion that the sun is the cause of warming the rock. (This is certainly a position rejected by Schopenhauer since it separates per­ ception and the understanding.) Concepts are transcendental a priori conditions for experience and reflective thought, but do not refer to perceived objects themselves. These subjective concepts permit us to make a priori synthetic judgments about the world in everyday life and in natural science. The central question in all this is: How are empirical judgments possible through pure concepts? This is the question of the “objective validity” and applicability of subjective concepts. How is it possible that concepts of the human mind form objects of experience and make judgments about the world? How can we get an adequate understanding of the objective world if we are applying subjective concepts? As Bryan Magee points out, be­ fore Kant’s Copernican Revolution, philosophers had treated the objects and subjects of knowledge as independent entities. Kant re­ jected this Cartesian dualism by integrating subjectivity and objec­ tivity.52 The answer to the problem for Fischer lies in the section of the Critique which examines the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding. The solution has already been antici­ pated in the previous section of the Critique, dealing with time and space as subjective forms of intuition. Here, too, objective phenom­ ena are created through subjective concepts. Fischer sees the an­ swer in Kant’s theory of appearances. Without these subjective cat­ egories, experience of an external world becomes impossible. An objective experience is one which connects perceptions in a univer­ sal and necessary manner. Fischer accepts what he calls “a plain and irrefragable statement” that access to the objective world is only through our phenomenal representation of it. Both the forms of intu­ ition and experience lie in subjective consciousness, and “all phe­ nomena are objects within us." Fischer then asks the question: If objects of intuition and experience are “nothing but our phenom­ ena, and as such nothing beyond our representation, how comes it that we consider them as objects?53 From the multiplicity of the manifold of the sensations, objects of perception (phenomena) and experience (nature) are constituted through the formal and logical unity of apprehension and recognition. The transcendental unity of representations occurs in pure self-consciousness. The initial sensa­ tions or sense impressions are unorganized, unconnected, and inde-

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terminate. The imaginative power and synthesis of reason connects them into a coherent unity. Kant viewed this process of intuition in terms of the three stages of apprehension, reproduction, and recog­ nition. Impressions, or the manifold of sensations, are apprehended and placed within a temporal order and unity; each distinct impres­ sion vanishes and is immediately connected with the reproduction of previous impressions to form a continuity of impressions over time; and, finally, we recognize that the impressions form a syn­ thetic unity of the same external object over time. These are the necessary a priori conditions for knowledge of an object. Objects of intuitions, perceptions, and experience require the syn­ thetic unity of apperception in a transcendental consciousness that unifies representations over space and time. “The consciousness of self is at the same time the consciousness of the synthetic unity of all my representations....The Ego as the first and highest principle of knowledge [is] the foundation of all objectivity...”54 But does this mean that the distinction between the Aesthetic and Analytic is be­ ginning to break down as it did in the work of Schopenhauer? Since Kantian sensibility and understanding are two qualitatively different cognitive faculties of the mind—intuition and intellect—Lange asks how can they be mediated and united in experience; how can the a priori categories be applied to the sensuous phenomena? For him, this is accomplished by the imaginative powers of the mind. Radicalizing Kant in Nietzsche With his theory of the principle of sufficient reason, Schopenhauer expands the Kantian distinction between the thing-in-itself and the phenomena by referring to will and the illusions of the appearances.55 Whereas Kant used the notion of the thing-in-itself to frame his re­ jection of traditional epistemology, justify his critique of dogmatism and scholasticism, develop his doctrine of the categories and a priori forms of the understanding, and explain his theory that conscious­ ness provides the universal and necessary conditions for experience and science, Schopenhauer transforms this notion into an existential category of will. That is, though accepting much of Kant’s theory of knowledge, he believes that the thing-in-itself represents will, striv­ ing, and suffering in the phenomenal world. He turns the concept of the thing-in-itself into the foundation for his existential critique of empirical reality. In this process, the emphasis in Kant’s epistemol­ ogy shifts from the universal laws and absolute principles of the

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phenomena provided by consciousness to a recognition of the irra­ tionality, relativity, and changeability of knowledge and being. Kant had attempted to show through his transcendental deduction the objective validity and empirical applicability of the concepts of Newtonian physics to the world. He wanted to justify their relevancy to the construction of experience and the foundation of science. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, is not interested in pursuing these issues, since ultimately the world is a place of illusion and decep­ tion, and not a place of universal truth. With Lange and Fischer we get a more detailed understanding of Kant’s theory of knowledge and the central role of subjectivity in forming objectivity. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) will pick up on these interpreta­ tions of Kant to develop a more radical critique of knowledge found in his theory of perspectivism. Stephen Houlgate writes, “[Kantian] epistemology casts a lingering shadow over Nietzsche’s thinking throughout his philosophical career.”56 Nietzsche rejects Kant’s theory of transcendental deduction since there is no justification, no objec­ tive validity, and, therefore, no objective reality created by the con­ ceptual forms of the understanding. Once the subjective element was introduced into the critique of rationalism and empiricism, the next logical step in the development of German epistemology was the recognition of an unbridgeable divide between concepts and re­ ality, subject and object. Though Kant recognized that science could never have knowledge of the thing-in-itself but only of the appear­ ances, he nevertheless contended that there is an objective validity or equal relationship between the concepts of the mind and the mani­ fold of the appearances. Experience and knowledge of the world conform to the a priori principles and rules of the mind; we create a real world that could be scientifically studied through physics and mathematics. He persisted in arguing that the concepts were not ar­ bitrarily imposed upon the world but had a transcendental validity that could be justified using his critical method. But in his critique of traditional epistemology, Pandora’s box had been opened. Schopenhauer emphasizes the role of consciousness in represen­ tation and knowledge, but does not make the final break with Kantian philosophy. He, too, rejects traditional realism and idealism as offer­ ing a privileged access to truth by justifying the law of causality and the principles of science from experience and reason. The relation­ ship between concepts and empirical reality was becoming more and more tenuous and problematic. By stressing subjective repre-

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sentations and knowledge mediated through consciousness, Schopenhauer is drawing philosophy closer to the edge of the abyss of nihilism and relativism. But this final theoretical step would have to wait for N ietzsche’s hammer. It is he who radicalizes and historicizes the implications of Kant’s work by arguing that what we know are only the nihilistic representations themselves. We never do get to any objective world of experience; we know only the cre­ ated and temporary forms of our own mind. Through the writings of Schopenhauer, Lange, and Fischer, Nietzsche appropriates the three critiques of Kant.57 He transforms the critique of pure reason into a critique of epistemology, subjectivism, and perspectivism; the cri­ tique of practical reason into a cultural genealogy of herd morality, nihilism (utilitarianism and ressentiment), and the will to power; and the critique of judgment into a critique of the aesthetics of the Apollonian and Dionysian drives. He radicalizes Kantian critical theory by pushing it to the logical limits of its subjective rationality in science, morality, and art in such a way that he calls into question the very heart of Enlightenment values. From the critique of pure and sufficient reason, he develops his own theory of Apollonian and Socratic reason. Weaving between the impressions of Hume and the reason of Leibniz, Kant attempted to preserve the universality and necessity of logical principles and the a priori organization of the mind. How­ ever, by grounding knowledge of the world in sensibility and under­ standing, by reducing objectivity to phenomena, by moving the thing-in-itself and absolute reality beyond reason, and by stressing the subjective construction of reality, Kant built the foundations for his own demise. The critique of pure reason provides the self-reflec­ tive basis for the later critique and rejection of epistemology and foundationalism. Thinking he resolved the dilemma of objective validity by integrating rationalism and empiricism, Kant supplied the later skeptics with the framework to kill universality. With the evolution of the Kantian theory of self from Schopenhauer and Lange to Nietzsche, there is a development of subjectivity from a transcen­ dental and psychological to an anthropomorphic perspective. What began as part of the transcendental deduction in the Analytic ends in Nietzsche’s agnosticism and skepticism about objectivity. He has radicalized the Kantian theory of knowledge and with it the whole foundations of universality and truth.58 In the process, the objectiv­ ity of the world dissolves before the subjectivity and relativity of the

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categories. Nietzsche replaces Kant’s transcendental world of cat­ egories with a mythopoetic world of aesthetic drives; the concepts of the understanding with the forms of Dionysian creativity and Apollonian rationality; objectivity and universality with mythologi­ cal and fictional concepts; the a priori universality of time, space, and causality with the illusory forms of Apollonian being, reason, and art; and, finally, he replaces the transcendental subject with the striving Übermensch (Overman). Kant’s critical theory of the universal categories of the understand­ ing and Newtonian physics is transformed into an anthropomorphic relativism and theoretical skepticism whose origins lie in Darwinian pragmatism and instrumental utilitarianism.59 In the end, the world is ultimately true only “for us.” The universality of Kant’s theory of knowledge is rejected and replaced by a crisis of science and rea­ son. Only what is useful for the preservation and survival of the human species and the enhancement of life has validity. Objective reality melts into subjectivity—all that is solid melts. “Nietzsche understood that Kant’s theory of knowledge led to the view that nature is a representation-world, that man does not discover laws in nature but projects them into the natural world....With an irony that Nietzsche fully appreciated, the precise way in which Kant sought to lend support to natural science tended to generate skepticism about the objective validity of scientific knowledge.”60 Nietzsche borrows from Schopenhauer’s existential view of the suffering and misery of the world and the conceptual forms and illusions of Maya which veil the painful reality with the appearance of meaning and substance. He also borrows from Lange’s Kantian psychology and Fischer’s epistemology with their rejection of the knowability of essential reality and the thing-in-itself and their belief that impressions and phenomena are subjective and mental creations. Relying upon these authors, Nietzsche’s ideas move from his earli­ est writings on the anthropomorphism of Greek physics and phi­ losophy in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” and Philoso­ phy in the Tragic Age o f the Greeks and the Dionysian mythology and Apollonian forms that provide meaning to life in The Birth of Tragedy to his later writings on active nihilism, intoxication of the revaluation of values, and critical perspectivism in The Will to Power. Nietzsche’s understanding of Kant is filtered through the subjectiv­ ism and phenomenalism of the existential Kantians.61 Sensibility and understanding as principles of sufficient reason create the objects of

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experience as phenomena. These objects are determined by physi­ ological and psychological conditions of the subject; experience occurs filtered through the senses and concepts of the mind. There is never a question of access to noumenal reality or things as they really are independent of perception and thought. The true essence or inner reality of things is inaccessible and the only real world is that constructed by the subject.62 From here there is only a short step to Nietzsche’s position that concepts are metaphors, fictions, and useful assumptions of our will to power that organize and shape the chaos of impressions but in themselves have no transcendental or universal validity. In his earliest writings, these metaphorical con­ structions appear in the form of Greek mythology, pre-Platonic phys­ ics and philosophy, Attic tragedy, Socratic rationalism, and modern science. In his later works, they appear as forms of idolatry, herd morality and religion, Kantian philosophy, political and economic ideologies, and scientific rationality. The result is a “despair of all truth,” for Nietzsche sees the world as constantly becoming in which subjective representations and per­ spectives are continually revaluated and overcome. There is no im­ manent or transcendent claim to absolute truth. By moving from Kant’s transcendental subject to the psychological subject of Schopenhauer, Lange, and Nietzsche, the initial claims of a priori ne­ cessity and objective validity of the pattern of thought have been re­ placed by the pure subjectivism and relativism of knowledge; the regu­ lative principles of consciousness and universal laws of physics have become convenient pragmatic and utilitarian rules of thought. By creat­ ing a stable world of unchanging being and universal laws, truth has become instrumental. We have constructed a world of regularity and unchanging relationships which permit us to intelligently anticipate the future. Foresight and prudence are the true virtues of the utilitarian. In the last instance, what we know are only the changing forms of thought imposed upon the world by ourselves.63 We know the subject and our own representations but never the real object. By introducing the importance of the subjective organization of the mind into his theory of knowledge, Kant had unknowingly laid the foundation for nihilism and the later critique of objectivity and crisis of modern science. There are no longer any inherent values or teleology in the world or any values in a transcendental subject. The stage has been set for Nietzsche’s theory of skepticism, conventional perspectivism, and agnostic nihilism, as well as Weber’s theory of rationalization.

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Discovering Agnosticism and Nihilism in Kant Under the unusual circumstances of not having completed his doctoral dissertation but having been recognized for his unusual capabilities, Nietzsche in 1869 accepted a position as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. His lec­ tures covered a broad range of topics, including pre-Platonic phi­ losophy and physics, Plato, and Greek tragedy. In 1872 he pub­ lished his first and arguably greatest work, The Birth of Tragedy, and over the next few years produced four works on Strauss, history, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, entitled Untimely Meditations. He also wrote many unpublished manuscripts which have since come to light. During this early period the major ideas which would intoxicate his life’s work were initially developed, especially his appropriation of German critical theory and Kant’s theory of science and knowledge, his critique of modern science and Enlightenment rationality, and his theory of epistemological skepticism and nihilism. These themes were integrated into his overarching perspective of the tragic view of the world as a place of nothingness, suffering, heroic endurance, and self-overcoming. He would use his investigations into Attic phi­ losophy and drama to examine both the tragic insight of the Greeks and the crisis of modernity as articulated by Kant and Schopenhauer. The Greeks were to be the mirror by which the tragic soul of moder­ nity would reveal itself and be released. In the summer semester of 1872, Nietzsche offered a course on pre-Platonic philosophy and later that year began to write on the connection between Greek philosophy and German critical theory in his manuscript, “The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Be­ tween Art and Knowledge.” The following summer semester he again gave a course of lectures on this topic and started to write on the theme of truth and knowledge in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” These two early unpublished notebooks provide insight into his earliest understanding and appropriation of both Greek and Kantian philosophy. Kant and Schopenhauer represent the modern revival of the tragic spirit which has only existed once before, in the period of classical Greece between Homer and Plato. With the de­ velopment of the critical method, knowledge and its limits become the topic of investigation, and the foundation of metaphysics col­ lapses leaving only appearances and illusions. The quest for truth and science is replaced by the enhancement of life and art. Nietzsche

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sees Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as the beginning of a new tragic age which questions the anthropomorphic foundations and limits of relative knowledge as illusions whose purpose is to further life and the value of existence. Claims to certainty and absolute knowledge falter with the recognition that all we know about the world are our own representations of it. We can never get beyond the subjective and interpretive consciousness we have of phenomena. Access to absolute truth and the thing-in-itself are denied and ultimately to be replaced by a reinvigoration of life, by the “beauty and grandeur” of interpretation through aesthetic and moral consciousness. According to Nietzsche, moving beyond utilitarianism and eudaemonism requires a culture that integrates art and knowledge, happiness and self-realization, into a coherent and meaningful unity of aesthetic and moral illusions. The desperate drive to truth and universality which has characterized Western thought ever since Plato has hidden this insight in a dialectic of enlightenment and a crisis of reason. Kant and Schopenhauer unknowingly lay the foundations for a recognition of the underlying relativity and nihilism of knowl­ edge which again opens the possibility of seeing the true tragic na­ ture of the human condition. In these earliest notebooks, Nietzsche works through Kant’s critique of reason in order to uncover truths hidden behind the reified and static concepts of science and episte­ mology. Nietzsche takes up Kant’s arguments from the Aesthetic and Ana­ lytic in the Critique of Pure Reason. However, as in the case of his appropriation of Greek tragedy and philosophy, he never involves himself in a rigorous or systematic fashion in a traditional exegesis of German philosophy. Rather he attempts to look intuitively into Kant to draw out the fundamental insights that the latter pursues in his critical theory of knowledge. This flash of insight enlightens the reader as to the essence of Kant’s argument but blinds the reader as to the details of his logic and analysis. Nietzsche repeats Schopenhauer’s position that time, space, and causality organize the object of perception in the sensibility. Continuing the subjectivism and idealism of Schopenhauer, Lange, and Fischer, he says that we know the world to the degree that we know ourselves and the cat­ egories of the mind. But with Nietzsche, the universal and necessary categories of Kant have become conceptual illusions of our con­ sciousness that are incapable of grasping the underlying forces and reality of nature. We live on the phenomenal or Apollonian surface

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of being, never reaching the depths of the Dionysian wisdom of becoming. In the essay “The Philosopher,” Nietzsche contends that reality is mediated by the aesthetic forms or schemas which are only illusions necessary for survival. In The Birth of Tragedy, these illusions be­ come necessary in order to hide or mollify the effects of a funda­ mentally tragic insight into the transitoriness and painfulness of life. Maintaining the dualism between pure and practical reason, Nietzsche separates ethics and art from science and knowledge of the external world. The latter is the realm of deterministic and mechanical laws of physiology and nature, and the former is the realm of aesthetic illusions about individual freedom, heroic nobility, and human dig­ nity. Nietzsche views Kant’s ethics as integrating knowledge and faith, philosophy and religion, thereby creating a metaphysics be­ yond experience. By doing so, Kant unconsciously called into ques­ tion the absolute validity of science and in the process reduced knowl­ edge to mythical expressions. Nietzsche accepts the Kantian distinction between appearances and the thing-in-itself. This is important since it ultimately grounds his own critical idealism and nihilism. The senses are mediated by our conceptual framework through which we experience and un­ derstand the world. Concepts order and systematize the continuous flow of becoming in order to form a world of substance and quanti­ tative being. The thing-in-itself is inaccessible to consciousness, thereby reducing knowledge to a subjective experience of our rep­ resentations and images. Nietzsche certainly continues the diffi­ culties of Kant’s own epistemology by not clarifying the relation­ ship between sensibility and the understanding. In paragraphs fiftyfour and sixty-three of the essay, he seems to separate concepts, understanding, and thinking from sensation and images, which he characterizes as mirroring the surface of things. Concepts are words that name, systematize, and organize sensations. At the very least, Nietzsche is sloppy in his discussion of Kant at this point and ap­ pears to weave between Hume and Kant, empiricism and idealism. At this stage in his development, his theory of concept formation is based on Hume’s theory of abstraction and critique of universalism. His theory of the formal structure of the mind is Kantian. What helps him integrate the two epistemological moments is the common thread of skepticism and nihilism. If there is no apparent contradiction be­ tween the two moments, it is because Nietzsche’s work is too under-

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developed to articulate the problem. However, a few pages later, in paragraph eighty, he argues that time, space, and causality occur along with sensation. He is in a rush to transform Kant’s theory of knowledge into a critique of science and theory of aesthetics. Though there may be some inconsistencies of argument here, the larger over­ view reveals that Nietzsche comprehends the drive to knowledge as a construction of reality through the senses and thought. Whatever residual empiricism may remain in his ideas is overwhelmed by his Kantian epistemology and the crucial distinction between the ap­ pearances and the thing-in-itself. Even at this early stage in his career, Nietzsche views modernity as caught in the illusory claims of scientific objectivity and univer­ sality. Politics and society offer a life of mediocrity and Hobbesian competition of prudential self-interests. Justice and righteousness become an equilibrium within the marketplace of self-interests. This is a utilitarian world of hedonistic conformity and egoistic pleasure without transcendence or reconciliation though myths, art, love, or religion. There is no morality or spirit in this world, no striving for something other or beyond in the form of contemplative thought, compassionate nobility, or sublime beauty; there is only the waste­ land of scientific knowledge and material success, and subservience to alien values. In the end, there is only cowardice, timidity, and fear. This characterization of modernity prefigures his later descrip­ tion of the “last man” in the preface to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Weber’s view of the iron cage and rationalization. It is a society composed of bureaucratic specialists, shallow individualists, and political nihilists. The Greeks, on the other hand, provide us with an alternative model of social life based on the inspiration and love of philosophy and art. They transfigured life, mastered the drive for scientific knowledge, reconstructed meaning, and reconciled exist­ ence through the creation of necessary and tragic lies. This con­ sciousness was formed by the pre-Platonic philosophers who recog­ nized the metaphorical and mythical character of physics and sci­ ence. This perspective is more fully developed in Nietzsche’s Phi­ losophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (written in 1872).64 In mod­ em times this insight has been revived by the critical theory of Ger­ man Idealism with its essential distinction between appearances and reality, phenomena and thing-in-itself. It was Kant who provided the modems with a tragic awareness with his critique of reason and the subjective foundations of knowledge.

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Nietzsche’s major insight in his earliest writings of the 1870s is that pre-Platonic Greek philosophy, science, and mythology (Anaximander, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and Sophocles) recognized that the forms of all experience were expressed in terms of anthropomorphic con­ cepts and metaphors. Humans became the measure of reality and projected their own images onto the phenomenal world. “In their mythology the Greeks transformed all of nature into their own im­ age. It was as if they regarded nature merely as a masquerade and a disguise for anthropomorphic gods....There was within them a pro­ found opposition between truth and appearance.”65 This, too, is the major breakthrough in the eighteenth century with the philosophy of Kant: “It has to be proven that all constructions of the world are anthropomorphic, indeed, if Kant is right, all science. There is, to be sure a vicious circle here; if the sciences are right, then we are not supported by Kant’s foundation; if Kant is right, then the sciences are wrong....Even the Kantian theory of knowledge was immedi­ ately employed by man for his own self-glorification: the world has its reality only in man.”66 But Nietzsche is concerned here about the skepticism that results from Kant’s critique of pure reason. He pushes himself to move beyond knowledge and science to art and noble creativity. One year later in 1873 he writes “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” This work is more polished and sophisticated in style and content than many of his previous unpublished essays. In it, Nietzsche maintains the unknowability of the thing-in-itself, the in­ comprehensibility and inaccessibility of the essence of reality, the nominalism of concept formation, the utilitarian construction of ab­ stract universals, the anthropomorphic character of all knowledge, and the unconscious nature of forms as metaphors. “Truths are illu­ sions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force....It is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be ‘truth in itself’ or really and universally valid apart from man.”67 The world we live in is a complicated conceptual framework constructed to organize reality by means of concepts, illusions, and metaphors. This is what Nietzsche means by aesthetic creativity. As he expresses it, the world is a continuous echo of the original sound of man reverberating throughout nature. Objectivity has now been reduced to subjectivity, as the world of things becomes

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a mere reflection of our own metaphors and constructs. Kant had argued for the unknowability of the thing-in-itself; now Nietzsche argues for the unknowability of things in general. The original im­ portance of the manifold of representations is replaced by the repre­ sented metaphor. Objectivity is not only known by subjectivity, but is reduced to it. The residual elements of an external world disap­ pear in the skepticism of Nietzsche and radicalization of Kant. The external world of being with its organized structure of substance, causality, and motion; with its delineable objects such as tables, chairs, houses, and so forth; and with its security of relative stability, is the result of an “artistically creating subject.” Nietzsche rejects any notion of a “correct perception” of reality and even imagines the possibility that birds and bees perceive the world differently and thus have a different concept of reality. The relation between subject and object is ultimately an aesthetic relationship, not amendable to absolute certitude and universal truth. Borrowing from Schopenhauer, he views the world as the veil of Maya. From one perspective, the full corpus of Nietzsche’s works may be understood as a response to Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason. With major reservations and revisions, Nietzsche accepts the general Kantian positions in epistemology and ethics at the same time that he moves beyond them. As he pushes idealism into skepti­ cism and nihilism, the forms that structure our experience, thought, and moral knowledge are understood within the framework of his­ torical consciousness. That is, through his analysis of Greek my­ thology, art, philosophy, and physics, as well as through his geneal­ ogy of the Platonic dialogue, Christian scholasticism, scientific ra­ tionalism, herd morality, and political liberalism, Nietzsche attempts to trace the patterns of consciousness or forms of the understanding through which Western society has structured the way it thinks about the phenomenal world. Moving beyond the lim its of K ant’s Newtonian principles, the universal laws of physics, and the natural rights underlying the categorical imperative, Nietzsche sees the is­ sue of the organization of the human mind and its formal structuring principles as particular and historical—and thus open to a genea­ logical and phenomenological analysis. He replaces the a priori uni­ versal and necessary categories of the mind with perceptual metaphors, causal metonymies, linguistic illusions, and anthropo­ morphic abstractions. This is the unconscious structure of the mind formed over time by means of aesthetic illusions and metaphoric

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deceptions—what Nietzsche calls “residues of metaphors,” “ghostly schemata,” and “the graveyard of perception.” The world is a prod­ uct of illusions of the philosopher, the saint, and the artist—the sub­ lime, the noble, and the beautiful. Humans are creators of value, but with the coming of Plato and scientific rationalism there is a flight from life into a transcendent world of contemplative concepts and reified ideals. In another unpublished essay, “The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom” (1875), Nietzsche argues that the Greeks, though on the very edge of an insight into the nature of the tragic age, never achieved a higher level of development of humanity due to the retrograde influence of Socrates and Plato. Science is created by subjective representations and thought which over time become the disenchanted concepts of a reified nature. With Socrates, there is a split between wisdom and science, ethical values and the drive for knowledge, physis (nature) and the disenchanted cage.68 And this very split becomes the later foundation for Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre. The Kantian theory of knowledge has come a long way with Nietzsche. To understand the nature of knowledge and truth, we must first understand the genealogy and phenomenol­ ogy of consciousness—the history of philosophical, theological, aesthetic, and scientific metaphors. Nietzsche says that between knower and known, subject and object, there is no necessity or ob­ jective validity, that is, there is “no causality, no correctness, and no expression.”69 There is no possibility of verifying or falsifying knowledge because there is no ground either objective or subjective upon which to build truth as an absolute connection between con­ cepts and reality. Objectivity is an illusion created by the metaphori­ cal and aesthetic structure of the mind. In “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche refers to the categories of representation (time, space, and causality) in the following manner: “If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms.”70 This statement could easily represent his position on all types of knowledge. Following in Hegel’s footsteps and his critique of the limits of the Kantian critique in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Nietzsche, too, examines the changing forms of knowledge as the historical basis for nihilism. It is this radicalization of critical theory which holds to­ gether and gives coherence to the wide range of his writings. From Nietzsche’s earliest to his later works, he argues that it is the development of Platonic philosophy and scientific rationalism,

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along with Christianity and moral philosophy, that prepares the way for the decadence and nihilism of modernity. By formalizing and rationalizing the world through science and philosophy and by re­ treating from the world in religion, life is left a depleted wasteland that lacks all meaning, purpose, and design. In The Will to Power, published for the first time in 1901 from a selection of his unpub­ lished essays, he calls this “the end of the moral interpretation of the world.”71 The place of human habitation has become a meaningless abyss stripped of all values and ideals and characterized by an “air of mediocrity, wretchedness, [and] dishonesty.” This devaluation of all values is expressed by the retreat to a heavenly afterlife, salva­ tion, asceticism, and guilt; a herd morality is created which turns values upside down by transforming the subservience and obedi­ ence of slave consciousness into the accepted values of society; and reason and spirit are eclipsed as the will to power is reduced to a will to conformity. A supplicant compassion and fearful pity is aroused that short circuits strength and self-determination. Most of Nietzsche’s later writings attempt to delineate the nature of the modem forms of idolatry, trace the genealogy of religious and moral repression, dis­ cuss the possibilities of a revival of the will to power, articulate a new moral philosophy in the transvaluation of all values, and ground his philosophy in the myth of eternal return. These issues have been examined in other works, so for now only the Kantian elements will be stressed. In a famous passage of The Will to Power, Nietzsche argues that all science is subjective interpretation. This represents the culmina­ tion of the Kantian revolution in epistemology that began with criti­ cal idealism and ends in critical nihilism. He writes: “Against posi­ tivism which halts at phenomena— ‘There are only facts'—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing....In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings—perspectivism.”72 Our principles of logic, categories of time, space, and causality, forms of reason, and laws of physical nature are “provisional as­ sumptions” and inventions created out of instinctual need for the preservation of humanity that over time become reified as forms of true being. Philosophers believe in the formal categories of subject, object, substance, identity, and being as having a priori metaphysi-

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cal and universal validity beyond experience. Kant made the mo­ mentous Gopemican discovery that these categories revolved around the mind and not metaphysics. Hegel took the next step to historicize the categories as dialectical and phenomenological moments toward the Absolute Spirit, and Marx saw them as forms of false conscious­ ness and distorted ideology of the class structure of production. Fi­ nally, Nietzsche, returning to Kant, relativized the categories of rea­ son as mechanisms of species survival, utilitarian habit, and need for control. He gave Kant a Darwinian and pragmatic twist. Biology and instincts lie at the heart of this drive for knowledge.73 Reason organizes and schematizes phenomena into a mechanistic universe in order to make the world systematic, coherent, predictable, and calculable. The transformation and revaluation of metaphysical truths into fictions by the will to power reveal the “deception of beings” and the fetishism of logic. Even cause and effect, the heart of Newtonian science, are fictitious projects of the mind. Reason in science is narrowed from its lofty heights in critical theory to the status as enhancer of existence and power over nature. For as Nietzsche writes, “The categories are ‘truths’ only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us....Reason, as well as Euclidean space, is a mere idiosyncrasy of a certain species of animal.”74 The very concept of truth is “nonsensical.” Nature is a product of human forgetfulness and fear of the unknown and the uncontrol­ lable. The mechanistic world is organized around the idea of the body in motion. That is, there are causal things or constant unities (atoms) in the world seen in motion. All of this is a created formula or dogma based on the unifying identity of the ego in thought. Sci­ ence is always an anti-aesthetic reshaping or interpretation of nature according to subjective categories and psychological needs (instincts). Because something is useful, Nietzsche does not mean it is true. In fact, in Beyond Good and Evil, he claims that science is simply bad philology.75 Even in his later writings, there is still a tension be­ tween science and art, philosophy and wisdom. Though he now clearly rejects the Kantian thing-in-itself and views the drive to knowl­ edge as an example of the logic of perspectivism and semiotics, Nietzsche also preserves the existential Angst of Schopenhauer and the idea that the will to power is fundamentally an aesthetic drive to transform nothingness into a noble and moral community, that is, to create meaning and purpose, and not just the survival, of our own existence.

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The goal of knowledge is not to uncover truth or reach morality in itself, but to make humans stronger. This is what Nietzsche calls “the greatness of soul.”76 The happy individual who seeks pleasure is the herd animal who follows moral rules based on a conformity to the principle of “thou shall not.” The noble and heroic individual is one who maintains human dignity and creates moral values and meaning on the basis of “I will”—on the basis of his or her own will to power. This truly is the transformed and radicalized ideal of the self-legislating and autonomous will in Kant. At the same time, it is a Dionysian revolt against the tyranny of eighteenth-century reason and its abstract and utopian ideals; it is an affirmation of the striving individual who affirms him- or herself in the transfiguration and revaluation of the world through the self-affirmation of life. The trans­ formed manner of this moral discourse is not obedience to the cat­ egorical imperative, but the moral principle of the eternal return. The individual acts according to the maxim that the action would return again and again—’’everyone invent[s] his own virtue, his own categorical imperative.”77 The important thing is the act of the will and not the formal structure or logical maxim of practical reason. At the moral level, existence has no teleology, no essential aim or meaning, no underlying truth or reality, to be uncovered by reason. At the epistemological level, Nietzsche argues that it has been the belief in the categories of reason which has produced a nihilism of values, decadence of pathological happiness, and corruption of the spirit. But these, too, are fictitious constructions whose a priori ne­ cessity lies neither in the structure of being nor in the mind, but in the utilitarian need for power and control. These “constructs of domi­ nation” have been mistaken for essential forms or the thing-in-itself of reality with the result that existential and biological questions have been mistakenly viewed as philosophical issues. Moral and scientific knowl­ edge have only created false worlds of illusions that over time have reified into transcendent and universal truths. They have become fetishized and transformed into independent entities with their own re­ alities. But Nietzsche holds to the argument that they are only projec­ tions and perspectives of the mind whose goal is to dominate nature through science and conceal the reality of suffering through religion and politics. He, on the other hand, wants to cut through these dis­ torted forms to reveal the existential conditions of humanity. Like Kant, Nietzsche attacks metaphysics and dogmatism, and, like Hegel, he reexamines Kant through dialectical, historical, and

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cultural categories in his genealogies of science, religion, morality, and politics. The forms through which we interpret the phenomenal world are radically social and historical in nature. The more reality and truth are synonymous with being, that is, something to be dis­ covered outside humanity, the more the creative and aesthetic di­ mension of human activity is suppressed. The cultural categories of modernity are forms of vengeance and hatred against humanity. They represent a revenge or tyranny of reason against the highest aspira­ tions of the superior man toward courage, insight, aesthetic creativ­ ity, friendship, and solitude—the will to power of the self-overcom­ ing individual.78 Nietzsche is concerned that before the altar of truth humanity lies passive, peaceful, and resigned. Tyrannized by uto­ pian ideals and the estranged categorical imperatives of Christianity and Kantian philosophy, individuals are no longer capable of criti­ cal thought or autonomous action. “The slave wants an absolute.”79 Propaganda and charlatanism fill the void of nothingness with illu­ sions of being and equalizing universality. Before the claims of ab­ solute truth, universal morality, scientific objectivity, and an omni­ scient God, man cowers in fear, obedience, and supplication wish­ ing only to conform to the established reality and never piercing its oppressive and mythological facade.80 But it is the Übermensch, intoxicated by the Dionysian spirit and radicalized by the will of Kant and Schopenhauer, who sees that everything is just illusory perspective. And in words that anticipate Weber, Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) writes, “All seeing is essentially per­ spective and so is all knowing. The more emotions we allow to speak in a given matter, the more different eyes we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our concept of it, the greater our ‘objectivity.’”81 Greek Tragedy and the Critique of Reason There are now a few questions which Nietzsche must answer. What are the origins of these conceptual frameworks? And why are these aesthetic worlds created? What inner need do they fulfill? The later writings seem to stress a utilitarianism of biological survival, that is, our culture helps us adapt to the world. His early works emphasize a more humanist and existential justification—Hellenic art helped the Greeks cope and survive, but it also helped them dream and de­ velop. Culture gave meaning to a meaningless world. Answers to some of these questions are to be found in The Birth of Tragedy.

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Nietzsche reveals how the Greeks could provide the modems with a means for understanding themselves and for learning how an inte­ grated culture may overcome the fragmentation of modem conscious­ ness and science.82 The flowering of classical Greek mythology and tragedy with its pantheon of gods offered a response to the dilemma of Silenus, a follower of Dionysus. When asked what the greatest good for humanity was, he responded by saying that is was best not to have been bom and once having been bom to die early. The world was seen as an ephemeral place of suffering and pain punctuated by more misery. Schopenhauer’s existentialism is brought together with Nietzsche’s philological training in classical Greek. The litany of human suffering is outlined in the writings from Homer to Sophocles. In the lives of Agamemnon and Odysseus, Oedipus and Antigone, Clytemnestra and Orestes, and Prometheus and Sisyphus, we see a world, from Nietzsche’s perspective, naked before the ter­ rors and horrors of human existence. This is the Dionysian wisdom of the tragedy that underlies the human condition. But the Greeks in spite of this knowledge continued to exert themselves and cling to life. Whether it is ten years of fratricidal warfare and unrelenting od­ yssey, murder and incest, adultery and matricide, or eternal suffering and heroic resistance, the Greeks saw a world of political intrigue, individual arbitrariness, personal hubris, and unremitting pain. Rather than retreating into existential resignation and false pessimism, Nietzsche takes the opposite approach. He sees that “the Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all they had to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians....The Apollonian need for beauty had to develop the Olympian hierarchy of joy by slow degrees from the original titanic hierarchy of terror, as roses are seen to break from a thorny thicket.”83 By the indifference of their Olympian gods to good and evil, the Greeks deified life itself and the immense power of art and imagination to create a mythology and meaning for the world which only enhances and confirms life. Suffering for a purpose transforms existence from a wretched and horrible experience into something noble and beautiful. Through its Apollonian art, Athenian society formed an ordered nature and moral cosmos with its own theodicy and metaphysics. A distinctive Olym­ pian mythology and Hellenic will appeared which offered aesthetic consolation and direction—“a metaphysical solace.” The Greek po­ ets created an illusory world of myths and gods which transformed

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human suffering and fits of nausea into the spirit of the sublime. “Beauty vanquishes the suffering that inheres in all existence, and pain is, in a certain sense, glossed away from nature’s countenance.”84 Art performed a healing process in face of the horrible absurdity of existence: “Life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful.”85 Apollonian art protected, nurtured, and enhanced life; it hid the ab­ surdity and terror behind the universal and offered humans a com­ mon ground and understanding of their lives. Greek tragedy made life possible in spite of Dionysus and in spite of Schopenhauer’s perception of the tragic reality of existence, because it created a world of nobility, beauty, and apparent true being. In his analysis of trag­ edy, Nietzsche implies that tragedy gives us insight, if only analogi­ cally, into the nature of the reality of the thing-in-itself. But when the tragic age ended with the works of Euripides and Socrates, with the rise of formal philosophy and scientific rational­ ism, tragic wisdom disappeared along with the integration of Dionysian and Apollonian aesthetic drives. They were replaced by a reified and cold search for the universal truth of being in philosophy and science. The illusions and myths of tragedy, along with the imagi­ native creativity of art became transformed into the ontological cat­ egories of essential being and true reality with their desperate drive to knowledge and mastery of nature. The lie was made real and the illusion became metaphysical. Into the dilemma of modernity and science came Kant and Schopenhauer, who presented to Nietzsche the possibility of revaluating and reconstructing the tragic age of the Greeks in modem form. First, he interprets Kant’s critique of pure reason as an examination of the nature of reason, the limits of sci­ ence and the restrictive range of the applicability of the laws of cau­ sality, and a rejection of the universality and necessity of scientific knowledge and the illusions of metaphysics. “Whereas the current optimism had treated the universe as knowable, in the presumption of eternal truths and space, time, and causality as absolute and uni­ versally valid laws, Kant showed how these supposed laws serve only to raise appearance—the work of Maya—to the status of true reality, thereby rendering impossible a genuine understanding of the reality....This perception has initiated a culture which I dare describe as tragic.”86 By means of a critical theory of knowledge, Kant was able to detail epistemologically the limits (and, therefore, the ulti­ mate relativity) of scientific rationality. In turn, Schopenhauer was able to describe phenomena and appearances as the veil of Maya

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behind which stood the reality of human pain and suffering. And through their efforts, the moderns stood on the doorstep of a dra­ matic recovery of the tragic vision of Dionysian wisdom. According to Nietzsche, the Dionysian spirit has begun to be re­ vived, first with music from Bach to Wagner and then with the phi­ losophy of Kant and Schopenhauer. Moving backwards in time, we are reentering an age of tragedy which combines music, epistemol­ ogy, and existentialism—an age in which knowledge and science are again seen as anthropomorphic and illusory projections of the aesthetic spirit. The world is beheld as a void punctuated by misery and pain. This is the knowledge that moves beyond the phenomenal to the Dionysian thing-in-itself or original Oneness of life. Beauty and wisdom are created only in the cauldron of intense pain. Nietzsche ends The Birth of Tragedy with the line, “What suffering must this race have endured in order to achieve such beauty.”87 Apollonian form-giving is reintegrated with Dionysian creativity and tragic insight, appearances with the thing-in-itself, and the agnosti­ cism and skepticism of Kant with the striving and suffering of Schopenhauer. Reason and dream have again come together in a new constellation and intoxicated rapture to reconcile humanity with nature. The result is a twilight of the old idols of science, politics, and rationalism and the dawn of a new sensibility of serenity and will to creativity expressed in a sublime and beautiful culture. New aesthetic myths and a new natural order are forming within a selfconsciousness about the nature of reality. The will to power has been unleashed. “Even as tragedy, with its metaphysical solace, points to the eternity of true being surviving every phenomenal change, so does the symbolism of the satyr chorus express analogically the pri­ mordial relation between the thing-in-itself and appearance.”88 Nietzsche believes that the German Idealist tradition represents a critique of the homelessness of modernity and a romantic longing for the Dionysian world of the ancient Greeks. For in the end, the Greek and German philosophers re-defined humanity in terms of its ability to create a world from its own anthropomorphic concepts. “The joy in shaping and reshaping—a primeval joy! We can com­ prehend only a world that we ourselves have made.”89 It is now time to return to a major question in this book: How do these existential treatments of Kant relate to the methodological is­ sues of social science? In the end, it is the world of neo-Kantian philosophy of social science and Kantian existentialism that frames

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the work of Weber and opens up an exciting arena of methodologi­ cal and epistemological insights. From Kant’s theory of knowledge and Rickert’s distinction between the natural and cultural sciences to Schopenhauer’s despair and resignation and Nietzsche’s nihilism and excitement at life’s possibilities, the stage has been set for the entrance of the methodological dispute and Weberian sociology. Notes 1.

2.

3.

George Stack writes in L a n g e a n d N ie tzsc h e (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1983) that Nietzsche “was more thoroughly influenced by, and more deeply im­ pressed by, this single work [Lange’s H isto ry o f M a teria lism ] than by anything else he ever read” (p. 4). For a critical review of Stack’s book with emphasis on the scholarly influences on Nietzsche’s thought, see Daniel Breazeale, “Lange, Nietzsche, and Stack: The Question of ‘Influence,’” In te rn a tio n a l S tu d ie s in P h ilo s o p h y 21 (1989): 91-103. One of Breazeale’s key points is that it was not Lange but Kuno Fischer, who, along with Schopenhauer, was the main influence on the develop­ ment of Nietzsche’s ideas. See Kuno Fischer, A C o m m e n ta ry on K a n t ’s C ritic k o f the P u re R ea so n , vol. 4 of The H isto ry o f M o d e m P h ilo s o p h y , trans. John Pentland Mahaffy (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1866) and A C ritiq u e o f K a n t, trans. W. S. Hough (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1888). Stack replies in “From Lange to Nietzsche: A Response to a Troika of Critics,” In tern ation al S tu dies in P h ilo so p h y 21 (1989): 113-24. See also Jörg Salaquarda, “Nietzsche and Lange,” N ie tzsc h e S tu dien 1 (1978); George Stack, “Nietzsche and Lange,” The M o d e m S ch o o lm a n LVII, no. 2 (January 1980): 137-48, and L a n g e a n d N ie tz sc h e , note 7, p. 12, for a summary of German sources, including the works o f E. Hocks, Walter Del Negro, Alwin Mittasch, and Anni Anders and Karl Schlechta; Richard Schacht, N ietzsch e (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 62; Gilles Deleuze, N ietzsch e a n d P h ilo s o p h y , trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 195; and Friedrich Kaulbach, “Kant und Nietzsche im Zeichen der Kopemikanischen Wendung: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Modernität,” Z eitsch rift f ü r P h ilo so p h isc h e F orsch un g 41 (July 1987): 349-72. John Wilcox also writes a response to Breazeale in the journal In tern a tio n a l S tu d ies in P h ilo so p h y 21 (1989) entitled, “The Birth of Nietzsche out of the Spirit of Lange.” Wilcox reaffirms the central position of Stack that Nietzsche’s basic ideas of the Ü b e rm e n sc h , eternal return, and will to power were derived from his reading of Lange (p. 82). Schopenhauer quoted in D. W. Hamlyn, “Schopenhauer on the Principle of Suffi­ cient Reason,” in S ch open h au er: H is P h ilo s o p h ic a l A ch ievem en t, ed. Michael Fox (Sussex, England and Totowa, NJ: The Harvester Press and Barnes & Noble Books, 1980), p. 79. Charles Nussbaum, “Schopenhauer’s Rejection of Kant’s Analysis of Cause and Effect ’’A u slegu n g 12 (Winter 1985), argues that Schopenhauer does not understand Kant’s transcendental logic and rejects his doctrine of categories and transcendental unity of apperception. He treats concepts as empirical abstractions (p. 37). Kant’s response to Hume’s theory of causality is lost in Schopenhauer. By failing to understand Kant’s transcendental theory as the basis for his response to Hume, Schopenhauer, according to Nussbaum, only recycles Cartesian dogmatism. He may use Kant’s terminology but the transcendental structure of experience is lost (p. 40). Some of the most important works on Schopenhauer in English have been: Frederick Copleston, A rth u r Schopenh auer: P h ilo so p h e r o f P essim ism (London: Search Press, 1975); D. W. Hamlyn, S ch o p en h a u er: The A rg u m en ts o f the P h ilo s o p h e rs (Lon-

118

4.

m vo r-

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason don: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Bryan M agee, T h e P h i lo s o p h y o f S c h o p e n h a u e r (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Julian Young, W illin g a n d U n ­ w illin g : A S tu d y in th e P h ilo s o p h y o f A rth u r S c h o p e n h a u e r (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987); and Christopher Janaway, S e lf a n d W orld in S c h o p e n h a u e r's P h i­ lo so p h y (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Arthur Schopenhauer, O n the F ou rfold R o o t o f th e P rin c ip le o f S u fficien t R e a s o n , trans. E. F. J. Payne (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1974), p. 50, and Ü b e r d ie vierfa ch e W u rzel d e s S a tze s vom zu reich en d en G ru n d e (1847), in A rth u r S c h o p e n h a u e r S ä m tlic h e W erke , vol. 1: S ch riften zu r E rk en n tn isleh re (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1948), p. 32. Ibid., p. 51, and S ä m tlich e W erke , vol. 1, p. 32. Ibid., p. 234, and S ä m tlich e W erke , vol. 1, pp. 159-60. Vojislav Bozickovic stresses the point in his essay, “Schopenhauer on Kant and Objectivity,” In tern ation al S tu dies in P h ilosoph y 28, no. 2 (1996), that Schopenhauer, by placing both the forms of sensibility and understanding in perception, treats them as intuitive and immediate, rather than as conceptual and intellectual. He maintains that Kant, on the other hand, distinguished between perception and understanding, objectivity and reflection, to emphasize the conceptual aspects of knowledge in the C ritiq u e o f P u re R e a so n (B 234, pp. 36-37). Bozickovic points out in agreement with Schopenhauer that the law of causality is intuitive and non-conceptual, and that concepts come from the faculty of reason (p. 38). Hamlyn, S c h o p e n h a u e r , makes the point clearly: “For Kant the function of the understanding was to bring intuitions under concepts according to certain laws or principles. For Schopenhauer its func­ tion is in effect to produce new intuitions out of those involved in sensation alone” (pp. 20-21). According to Kant, the understanding was discursive, conceptual, and part of thought and judgment, whereas for Schopenhauer, it is part of perception and experience. Concepts, not being part of the understanding or perception, are abstract categories derived from representations of perception and necessary for reflective thought and judgment. They are abstract constructions of reason and not part o f the understanding. Schopenhauer’s notion of ‘concepts’ comes closer to Locke’s use of the term ‘ideas’ and his doctrine o f abstractions than Kant’s usage. Rational judg­ ment takes place at the level o f concepts (pp. 23-24). Schopenhauer, O n the F ourfold R o o t o f the P rin c ip le o f Sufficient R e a so n , p. 75, and S ä m tlic h e W erke , vol. 1, p. 51. Later, Schopenhauer writes that the understanding organizes the sensations directly through the law of causality which does not in­ volve reflection or the use of “abstract knowledge by means of concepts and words” (p. 103, and S ä m tlic h e W erke , vol. 1, p. 71). Ibid., p. 78, and S ä m tlic h e W erke , vol. 1, p. 53. Schopenhauer, “Appendix: On Vision,” in O n th e F ou rfold R o o t o f th e P rin c ip le o f Sufficient R eason , p. 254, and Ü b er d a s Sehn un d d ie Farben , in A rth u r S ch open h au er S ä m tlic h e W erke , vol. 1: S ch riften zu r E rk en n tn isleh re (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1948), p. 20. Also see Julian Young, “Schopenhauer’s Critique o f Kantian Ethics,” K a n t S tu d ie n 75 (1984): 191-212 for an analysis o f Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant’s grounding of the categorical imperative in the principle of universalism, duty, and rationality. For him, Kant’s theory of practical reason was “unintelligible” (p. 200). On this issue also, see Hamlyn, “Schopenhauer and Kant,” in S ch o p en h a u er: The A rg u m en ts o f the P h ilo s o p h e rs , pp. 41-52. See endnote number 14 in chapter 1. Schopenhauer, O n th e F o u rfold R o o t o f th e P rin c ip le o f S u fficien t R e a s o n , p. 116, and S ä m tlich e W erke , vol. 1, p. 81. Schopenhauer remarks briefly about his criticism of Kant’s C ritiq u e o f P r a c tic a l R ea so n and the use of the categorical imperative. For a more fully developed analy-

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14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

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sis, see Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p. 3, and Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1, in Arthur Schopenhauer Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1949), p. 3. Hamlyn, Schopenhauer: The Arguments of the Philosophers, p. 4. Hamlyn looks into Kant’s idealism and discovers a distinct empiricist element. He claims that Kant’s theory of sensibility and representation with its blending of sensations and representations derives from Berkeley’s empiricism (pp. 4, 18, 42-46). By this means Kant was able to develop a theory o f objectivity as appearances which contained reference to both consciousness and empirical reality. This integrates, according to Hamlyn, both transcendental idealism and empirical realism, as Kant maintains the distinction between phenomena and noumena, appearances and thingin-itself. He wrote at times as if objects were distinct from experiences (p. 45). Schopenhauer, on the other hand, wishes to separate perceptions from sensations in an effort to get rid of the awkward metaphysical dualism between representations and objects— and with it its lingering empiricism. There are only subjective repre­ sentations in his subjective idealism. Reality is formed only through representa­ tions; there is no other competing, external or autonomous reality. “Reality consists of representations alone” (p. 45). This is a major reason for Schopenhauer’s argu­ ment that it is the a priori law of the understanding that helps the conscious mind to move from sensations to perceptions. James Chansky, “The Conscious Body: Schopenhauer’s Difference from Fichte in Relation to Kant,” International Studies in Philosophy 24, no. 3 (1992), views Schopenhauer (and Fichte) as recognizing that the conflict between idealism and realism is left unresolved in Kant (pp. 27 and 34-36). Chansky points out that there are two different readings o f Kant’s theory of experience and the objects o f perception. Either experience is phenomenal, in which case the world is seen through the subject and disappears without it, or experience is viewed as the integration o f an external object with the forms o f the understand­ ing. In the former case, subjective idealism stresses the primacy, if not the exclusiv­ ity, of the subject, whereas in the latter case, there is a residual empirical realism and metaphysical dualism between the representation and external cause of the represen­ tation. To justify his position, Chansky quotes two passages from the Critique of Pure Reason: “If we take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must cease to exist, as it is nothing but the phenomenon in the sensibility o f our subject, and a species of its representation” (A 383) and “the empirical part of perception is given from without.” Schopenhauer, like Heidegger after him (Kant and the Prob­ lem of Metaphysics), sees the first edition of the Critique as the real Kant with the second edition attempting to cover the radical and idealist implications of the first. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 3, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 3-4. Running throughout the early chapters o f The World as Will and Representation is a connection by Schopenhauer of epistemology to ontology. The ground of knowl­ edge and judgment is also the ground of being. Heidegger will later make a similar point when he contends that Kant provides the foundation for his theory of being. Kurt Mosser, “Nietzsche, Kant, and the Thing in Itself,” International Studies in Philosophy 25, no. 2 (1993), mentions that both Schopenhauer and Heidegger rejected the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (p. 70). In particular, Kant made substantive changes in the Transcendental Deduction. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” in The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications,

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason 1969), p. 437, and “Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie,” in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1, in Arthur Schopenhauer Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden:

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1949), p. 517. Robert Wicks, “Schopenhauer’s Naturalization of Kant’s A priori Forms of Empiri­ cal Knowledge,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 10, no. 2 (April 1993): 184-85. Wicks attempts to make a radical split between thought and sensations that just doesn’t exist in Schopenhauer. Compare W icks’s comments (pp. 182-85) to Schopenhauer’s in The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, pp. 438-39, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 519-21. Wicks is attempting to distinguish between perceptual knowledge and abstract knowledge in order to: separate reason from perception; argue that causality is neither a Kantian intuition nor concept but an a priori rule or principle; define reason as a process of abstraction and reflection; develop an empiricist treatment of concept formation and theory of abstractions; and justify his non-rational knowledge of the thing-in-itself, his theory of will, episte­ mological naturalism (a priori forms as neurological brain-functions, pp. 188-93), and the perceptual knowledge of Platonic Ideas as immediate, irrational, and nonconceptual (pp. 185-86). Schopenhauer, “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” pp. 417-18, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 494. Ibid., p. 420, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 497. Ibid., pp. 4 3 8 -4 4 3 , and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 519-25. Hamlyn in Schopenhauer: The Arguments of the Philosophers nicely summarizes this point when he writes, “Despite Kant’s famous remark about intuitions being blind with­ out concepts, and concepts being empty without intuitions, he does sometimes speak as if intuitions constitute a given in perception and as if these are then bound under concepts in judgment” (p. 44). This means that objects are formed in percep­ tion prior to the application of the understanding and that the latter’s function is only in reflection and judgment. Schopenhauer wants to place understanding earlier in the very constitution of objectivity in time, space, and causality. Schopenhauer, “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” p. 452, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 536. Ibid., p. 437, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 518. Ibid., p. 435, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 516. Ibid., p. 443, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 525. Ibid., p. 448, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 531. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 100, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 119. Schopenhauer contends that the will is the Kantian thing-in-itself. For a discussion on the six possible meanings o f this idea, see Moira Nicholls, “The Kantian Inher­ itance and Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of Will,” Kant Studien 85, no. 3 (1994): 25779. This view of the will as the blind, irrational, and unconscious force that underlies the world is developed in R. K. Gupta, “Freud and Schopenhauer,” in Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement, pp. 226-35; Arati Barua, “Schopenhauer on Will: A Critique,” Indian Philosophical Quarterly 6 (January 1989): 44-45; and Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basis Books, 1970). The specific elements in Schopenhauer that are influential on Freud’s later development o f psychoanalytical theory are his views on the unconscious and will, renunciation and asceticism, will to live, human sexuality and disillusionment, negative view of women, repression and personality development, childhood experiences, criticism of religion, and tragic nature of humanity with its pessimism and despair. ‘Thus, Freud presents a view of

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31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

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the human condition which is entirely consistent with the general pattern and fabric of Schopenhauer’s philosophy (“Schopenhauer on Will,” p. 233). Barua stresses the integration o f the body and will, reason and irrational drives, since the “whole body is nothing but objectified will” (p. 48). The various manifestations of the body and intellect are but the expression of our underlying and more primary desires. As Schopenhauer has said, the relationship between the mind and body is like that of the strong blind man carrying the lame man who can see. The mind is incapable of action on its own and only serves the will. Julian Young, “Immaculate Perception: N ietzsche contra Schopenhauer,” Schopenhauer Jahrbuch 74 (1993): 74-76. Nietzsche rejects the escapism and passivity of Schopenhauer’s theory o f aesthetic pleasure and beauty as a loss of creative dynamism and the will to power (p. 84). Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 179, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 210. Jacques Taminiaux, “Art and Truth in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,” Man and World 20 (1987): 86-87. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 283, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 334. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 411, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 486. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 197, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 233. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 205, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 242. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 221, and Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 260-61. For an interesting analysis of the ways out of the void to salvation and Nirvana through art and asceticism, see Copleston, Arthur Schopenhauer, pp. 172-90. It is interesting to note that Lange, like Marx, J. S. Mill, and Nietzsche before him, relies on George Grote’s History of Greece (New York: P. F. Collier, 1899-1900) for his analysis of Greek philosophy. Friedrich Lange, The History of Materialism and Criticism o f its Present Impor­ tance, vol. 2: History of Materialism Since Kant, trans. Ernest Thomas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1925), p. 205, and Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. Baedeker Verlag, 1898), p. 39. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 210-11, and Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, vol. 2, p. 44. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 164, and Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, vol. 2, p. 10. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, p. 197. Lange, The History of Materialism, vol. 2, p. 216, and Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, vol. 2, p. 48. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 231, and Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, vol. 2, p. 60. Fischer, A Commentary on Kant ’s Critick of the Pure Reason. For a brief historical and philosophical introduction to Kuno Fischer and his relation to the neo-Kantians, see Thomas Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860-1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978), pp. 58-68. Fischer, A Commentary on Kant’s Critick of the Pure Reason, p. 43. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p 62. There is another study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which interprets the relationship between intuition and understanding quite differently. For example, Stephen Houlgate in his essay, “Kant, Nietzsche and the ‘Thing in Itself,”’Nietzsche Studien

122

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53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason 22 (1993), seems to combine perception and experience under the a priori forms of intuition and the categories of thought as the necessary conditions of human expe­ rience (pp. 117-18). Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, p. 109. Magee summarizes nicely the traditional epistemology problem: “The problem then became to explain how the latter [independent subjects] could reproduce the former [independent objects] within themselves, and how they could possibly have any notion o f the accuracy, if any, with which they had done so.” Locke began with the objects and moved to their representations in the subject, while Fichte had begun with the ego and moved to the objects of the external world. Magee maintains that Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer rejected this Cartesian dualism and attempted to find their individual paths out of this epistemological dilemma (p. 110). Fischer, A Commentary on Kant's Critick of the Pure Reason, p. 78. Ibid., pp. 84 and 85. Houlgate, in “Kant, Nietzsche and the ‘Thing in Itself,’” sees the appearances as the fictions of being articulated in the substance o f unity, ego, thing, motion, and atom (p. 137). “Their being resides in their relation to subjectivity” (p. 138). In Nietzsche’s radicalization o f Kantian epistemology, appearances are transformed into cultural fictions. Ibid., p. 121. Houlgate is unambiguous in seeing objectivity and experience result­ ing from both the sensations and understanding. He writes further on in his essay, “Despite the multiplicity of his perspectives on life, Nietzsche’s understanding of human consciousness is dominated by one recurring idea: That ‘it is the human intellect that has made appearance appear and transported its erroneous basic con­ cepts into things’” (quoted from Human, All Too Human, 1878) (p. 131). Since many of these issues have been examined before in other contexts, there is no need to reexamine the extensive literature on epistemology, morality, and Kant in Nietzsche. See Chansky, “The Conscious Body,” p. 39. Nietzsche read Lange’s History of Materialism in the summer o f 1866 and Kuno Fischer’s two-volume work on Kant in the winter o f 1867-68. Stack stresses in Lange and Nietzsche that Lange’s contribution to Nietzsche’s intellectual develop­ ment and appropriation of Kant was his emphasis on subjectivism with its form­ giving and structuring of impressions (p. 211). Lange was very influential on the development of Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge in the early unpublished writings in the 1870s written at the University of Basel, including “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” and the Philosophenbuch. After that period, his name appears only three times in Nietzsche’s unpublished writings in the 1880s. Breazeale, “Lange, Nietzsche, and Stack,” questions why there is no recognition or reference to Lange in Nietzsche’s later work, but agrees that in his earlier writings there is a clear “hyperbolic Kantianism,” though he disagrees with Stack as to its source (p. 96). Stack replies in a later article in International Studies in Philosophy entitled “From Lange to Nietzsche.” He reconfirms his original arguments that it is from Lange that Nietzsche gets his ideas on the will to power, Übermensch, and the eternal return of the same, along with his analysis of agnosticism, the scientific culture and scientific anthropomorphism, his philosophy of science, criticisms of Plato and Christianity, his general critique of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, his psychologistic interpre­ tation of Kant, and his argument that the categories of the understanding are mental fictions (pp. 115 and 117-23). He counters Breazeale’s argument that Nietzsche gets his notion o f the will to power from Schopenhauer with the point that it is Schopenhauer whom Nietzsche criticizes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “The empha­ sis on the lust for power in man in Lange’s History reinforced Nietzsche’s thinking about power in human life not in light of Schopenhauer’s ideal of the renunciation of

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58.

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the will to existence..” (p. 114). The real difference between Lange and Nietzsche is, according to Stack, that Lange had a strong political identification with socialism. For a more detailed study of the origins of Nietzsche’s thought in German critical theory and the relationship between Kant and Nietzsche, see George McCarthy,

Romancing Antiquity: German Critique of the Enlightenment from Weber to Habermas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), pp. 31-37, note 60, p. 294, and note 72, p. 296, and Dialectics and Decadence: Echoes of Antiquity in Marx and Nietzsche (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,

59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

1994), pp. 222-23,226ff., note 7, p. 343, note 3, p. 355, note 17, p. 357 and note 6, p. 365. Stephen Weiss, “Nietzsche and the Thing in Itself: Surviving Modem Kant Scholarship,” International Studies in Philosophy 25, no. 2 (1993): note 2, p. 83; and Mosser, “Nietzsche, Kant, and the Thing in Itself,” pp. 67-77. Mosser outlines the general references to Kant throughout Nietzsche’s writings (p. 69). S tack, Lange and Nietzsche, p. 207. George Stack, “Kant and Nietzsche’s Analysis o f Knowledge,” Dialogos 22 (Janu­ ary 1987): 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Schopenhauer als Erzieher, in Nietzsche Werke:Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1972); Taminiaux, “Art and Truth in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,” pp. 93-98; and David Cartwright, “Reversing Silenus’ Wisdom,” Nietzsche Studien 20 (1991): 309-13. For an inter­ esting analysis of Kant’s and Nietzsche’s theory o f moral autonomy, see Richard White, “Nietzsche Contra Kant and the Problem of Autonomy,” International Stud­ ies in Philosophy 22, no. 2 (1990): 3-11. The development o f Nietzsche’s moral theory in terms o f the Overman and eternal return places him clearly in the Kantian tradition. Like Kant, Nietzsche’s central concern is with individual freedom, moral autonomy, self-legislation, self-determination, and personal sovereignty. Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche criticized scientific culture and dogmatism and phi­ losophized about the moral courage to move beyond them. “Kant and Nietzsche are therefore alike in emphasizing the priority o f individual autonomy and in making it the basis of all value” (p. 6). On this same theme, see Alfonso Linguis, “Autarchy : Kantian Type— Nietzschean Phantasm,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 1, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 223 and 234-40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche writes, “What then are our experi­ ences? Much more that which we put into them than that which they already con­ tain! Or must we go so far as to say: in themselves they contain nothing? To experience is to invent?” (p. 120, and Morgenröte: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3 (Berlin: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1988), p. 114. In his earlier writings, truth as Apollonian forms enhances life, offers meaning, and provides a creative response to the dilemma of Silenus and the nothingness o f life. However, his later writings provide a more biological and pragmatic view of knowl­ edge (poiesis), since he stresses the utilitarian aspects o f knowledge for survival. There seems to be a tension in Nietzsche’s philosophy between the will to power as an aesthetic enhancement o f tragic life and joyful wisdom through Dionysian cre­ ativity and Apollonian beauty, on the one hand, and the will to power as preserving life and having biological, technical, and instrumental characteristics on the other. The early works emphasize the aesthetics and the latter ones biology. Tensions between aesthetics and biology, art and instincts, idealism and materialism, and the

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65.

66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason will to create (form) and the will to survive are never resolved, possibly because of Nietzsche’s reluctance to systematize his writings as he philosophized with a ham­ mer. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962), and Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalterder Griechen, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, voi. 2, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1973). For an overview of this work, see McCarthy, Dialectics and Deca­ dence, pp. 200-20. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle between Art and Knowledge,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans, and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), para. 77, p. 30, and “Der Letzte Philosoph: Der Philosoph: Betrachtungen über den Kampf von Kunst und Erkenntnis,” in Friedrich Nietzsche Gesammelte Werke: Musarionausgabe, voi. 6 (Munich: Musarion Verlag, 1972), pp. 32-33. Ibid., para. 84 and 106, pp. 32 and 38, and Musarionausgabe, voi. 6, pp. 35 and 4243. The editor of this book, Daniel Breazeale, adds in a footnote that Nietzsche is relying upon the works of Schopenhauer and Lange here for his interpretation of Kant’s skepticism and theory of knowledge. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth , ed. Breazeale, pp. 84 and 85, and “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne,” in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, voi. 2, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1973), pp. 374-75 and 377. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Philosophy in Hard Times,” in Philosophy and Truth, ed. Daniel Breazeale, p. 107, and “Gedanken zu der Betrachtungen: Die Philosophie in Bedrängnis,” in Friedrich Nietzsche Gesammelte Werke: Musarionausgabe, voi. 7 (Munich: Musarion Verlag, 1920), p. 17; and “The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom,” in Philosophy and Truth, ed. Daniel Breazeale, p. 145, and “Wissenschaft und W eisheit im Kam pfe,” in Friedrich Nietzsche Gesammelte Werke: Musarionausgabe, voi. 6 (Munich: Musarion Verlag, 1920), pp. 117-18. This image of the cage returns in Twilight of Idols: or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 502, and Götzen-Dämmerung, in Friedrich Nietzsche Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, voi. 6, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1988), p. 99. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” p. 86, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, voi. 2, p. 378. Ibid., p. 87, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, voi. 2, pp. 37980. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 7 (Not found in German edition). Ibid., note 481, p. 267, and Nachgelassene Fragmente, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 8, voi. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1974), 7[60], p. 323. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans, by Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Gateway Edition, 1955), para. 36, p. 43, and Jenseits von Gut und Böse, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 6, voi. 2, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968), p. 51. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, para 515, p. 278, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 8, voi. 3, 14[152], p. 126.

Kantian Existentialism and the Warring Gods of Modernity 75. 76.

11.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

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Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, para. 22, p. 25, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 6, vol. 2, p. 31 . Nietzsche, The Will to Power, para. 981, p. 513, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 8, vol. 2 , 10[68], p. 161. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1969), para. 11, p. 577, and Der Antichrist, in Friedrich Nietzsche Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 6, p. 177. See also Beyond Good and Evil, para. 211, p. 135, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 6, vol. 2, pp. 148-49. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, para. 284, p. 227, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 6, vol. 2, pp. 241-42. See also Twilight o f the Idols, p. 506, and Friedrich Nietzsche Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 6, p. 103. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, para. 46, p. 54, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 6, vol. 2, p. 65. Throughout The Genealogy of Morals there is an impressive pre-Freudian psychol­ ogy of the unconscious with its theory o f repression, sublimation, compensation, aggression, guilt, conscience, and punishment. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy o f Morals, in The Birth o f Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956), p. 255, and Zur Genealogie der Moral, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 6, vol. 2, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968), p. 383. Nietzsche, “The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom,” p. 127 (Not in Musarion edition). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and the Geneal­ ogy of Morals, pp. 29-30, and Die Geburt der Tragödie, oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1972), pp. 31-32. Ibid, p. 102, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, p. 105. Ibid., p. 50, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, p. 52. Ibid., p. 111, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, p. 114. Ibid., p. 146, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, p. 152. Ibid., p. 53, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, p. 55. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, para. 495, p. 272 (Not found in Nietzsche Werke:

Kritische Gesamtausgabe).

3 Max Weber and the Kantians: Epistemology and Method in the Wissenschaftslehre Max Weber’s theory of science and the logic of methods, com­ monly known as his Wissenschaftslehre, is scattered throughout his writings and offers as many problems of interpretation as it provides exciting solutions to the sociological questions he raises. The sec­ ondary literature has been important but contains puzzlingly varied and contradictory interpretations of Weber, from Talcott Parsons’s and Jürgen Habermas’s positivistic twist to Toby Huff’s postmodernist variation and Wilhelm Hennis’s classical humanism. The difficulty with Weber’s writings in this area is that he is not always clear in his presentations and relies on heavy doses of various Kantian philo­ sophical traditions in Germany to supply his underlying meaning. His ideas are not systematically developed, nor are they adequately defined or coherently articulated. Rather, they represent a complex mixture of tantalizing insights and frustratingly underdeveloped positions. However, when integrated with the works of Kant, Lange, Rickert, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and examined within the broader historical context of the methodological disputes (Methodenstreit) of the nineteenth century expressed in the writings of Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, Gustav Schmoller, Carl Menger, and Rudolf Stammler, they take on a new and expanded dimension. When Weber is placed within the discussions of the epistemologi­ cal and existential Kantians, his metatheory comes to life. Viewed from within their writings, his ideas begin to form a more complete and imaginative picture. He borrows extensively from a broad range of German philosophy: Kant’s epistemology and critique of pure 127

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reason, Rickert’s theory of objectivity and concept formation in the cultural and natural sciences, Lange’s Kantian psychology of the mind, Schopenhauer’s principle of sufficient reason and existential pessimism, and, finally, Nietzsche’s theory of the crisis of Western decadence and nihilism, critique of rationalism and science, and moral philosophy of the will to power. Weber is part of a rich cul­ tural heritage and dynamic methodological tradition that rejects positivism and naturalism in social science. He relies heavily upon the neo-Kantian view of the historical and natural sciences, Windelband’s distinction between idiographic and nomothetic sci­ ence, Sim m el’s articulation of the differences between Gesetzeswissenschaft (nomological science) and Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (science of concrete reality), and Rickert’s theory of knowledge and value.1 A critique of empty positivism and the naturalistic prejudice continues throughout his methodological writings with his theory of knowledge and value relevance; theory of objectivity and ideal types; views on singular causality, historical explanation, objective possibility, and adequate causation; stress on historical science as a study of individual social action, intentions, and cultural meanings; disdain for historical and mechanistic deter­ minism; and rejection of both subjectivism (psychological empa­ thy) and objectivism (general social laws and deductive explanatory models). But there is lingering confusion over the relation between ethics and historical science, concepts and reality, thought and ac­ tion. And it is upon this confusion that the whole of his method­ ological writings rests. There remain a series of apparent conflicts within his epistemol­ ogy, methodology, and ontology that are never fully resolved—con­ flicts between his theories of constructivist epistemology and ex­ planatory metatheory, neo-Kantian concept formation and residual empiricism and realism, subjective intentionality and objective mean­ ing, understanding and explanation, history and science, particular events and general laws, individual motivation and historical cau­ sality, and historical reconstruction and deductive, hypothetical ab­ stractions. Weber’s goal is to transform an interpretive model of sci­ ence and rationality and make it compatible with a causal and “no­ mological” analysis of history by means of his method of interpre­ tive explanation. Unfortunately for the reader, he provides no clear guidelines for this methodological integration beyond understand­ ing and explanation. In the end, it will be his very attempt that will

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provide sociology with the methodological issues that will likely be its central concern well into the twenty-first century. In order to clarify the relationship between ethics and science, Weber makes important distinctions among interests, knowledge, and action. He treats the introduction of values in concept formation and theory construction in his interpretive and historical sociology quite differently than he does when discussing the implementation of theories in policy decisions or social criticism in the classroom. That is, Weber’s theory of value appears differently in his epistemo­ logical and methodological reflections than in his pedagogical and policy writings. He is much clearer on the relationship between in­ terests (value relevance) and knowledge (value freedom) than inter­ ests and human action.2 It becomes more difficult to follow his po­ sition on the relation between knowledge and action, that is, the relation among science, social critique, and public policy. But both aspects of his methodology lie within his appropriation of Kantian philosophy. Neo-Kantian epistemology forces Weber to acknowl­ edge a relation between ethics and science at the level of concept formation, but the influence of existential Kantianism directs him away from social planning and social policy. Weber does see an intimate connection between human interests and social research but rejects any relation between ethics and technical social action. This means that ethics is important in formulating the historical and sociological issues to be empirically examined, but there is an ap­ parent indifference of reason to an ethical critique of society. There is a fundamental break between ethics and action, theory and prac­ tice. This chapter traces the ground for this indifference of reason to Weber’s existentialism and nihilism and not to any residual positiv­ ism within his methodology. Finally, Weber does not eliminate com­ pletely the possibility of social critique. But a critique of society for him is based not on some fundamental moral principles or imma­ nent and dialectical method but rather on a historical critique of sci­ ence and reason that rests upon Nietzsche’s philosophy of history and theory of perspectivism. Weber began his earliest methodological writings at about the same time as he was doing his historical work on the Protestant Reforma­ tion and its relation to the development of the consciousness and values of the capitalist social order. From 1903 to 1907 he wrote six essays on subjects as diverse as Roscher’s historical method; Rickert’s theory of historical objectivity and meaning; Knies’s problem of

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causality, prediction, and irrationalism; the logic of the cultural sci­ ences and alternative forms of historical explanation and causation; the methodological differences between understanding and expla­ nation; Stammler and the materialist theory of history; and the logi­ cal problems of historical economics in Roscher and Knies. These essays have appeared in English in three works: the three essays on the Historical School of economics in Roscher and Knies, two es­ says on Rickert and Eduard Meyer in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, and a further critique of neo-Kantian legal philosophy and theory of science in The Critique o f Stammler. Later, in 1913, he wrote an essay in Logos on interpretive sociology and the method of understanding, and in 1917 he wrote another piece for Logos on Schmoller’s theory of value and ethical neutrality in sociology and economics. Finally, in 1919, on the encouragement of Rickert and others, he revised his original 1913 Logos essay which then re-appeared as the prefatory remarks of chapter one of Economy and Society. In this latter work, he expands on the importance of a soci­ ology of understanding found in the works of Rickert, Karl Jaspers, and Georg Simmel; later in the same work in the first chapter of part two, he once again critically responds to the works of the neo-Kantian philosopher Stammler.3 To these essays should be added his general methodological criticisms of historical materialism and Marxism scat­ tered throughout his writings. Finally, his theory of rationalization and the institutional development of modernity, the idea of science as a vocation, and his distinction between substantive and formal rationality offer us an alternative access to insights into his critique of reason and the limits of science. To appreciate fully Weber’s metatheory with its critique of posi­ tivism and empiricism, the crucial distinction he raises throughout his methodological writings between value relevance and value free­ dom must be examined. To accomplish this it is necessary to recon­ struct the traditions upon which he relies for these categories. The notion of value relevance (Wertbeziehung) comes from Rickert and his neo-Kantian philosophy of social science, and the interpretation of value freedom (Wertfreiheit) is derived from Nietzsche and his radical Kantianism.4 This chapter outlines Weber’s methodological perspective and critique of historical reason through the four dis­ tinctive epistemological traditions upon which his ideas are grounded: (1) the neo-Kantian philosophy of social science of Windelband and Rickert; (2) German idealism, existentialism, and the critique of

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empiricism and positivism of Lange and Schopenhauer; (3) the His­ torical School of economics and law of Roscher, Knies, Schmoller, and Stammler; and (4) the radical Kantianism and nihilistic critique of reason of Nietzsche. Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Science In his early methodological essay, “ ‘Objectivity’ in Social Sci­ ence and Social Policy” (1904), Weber outlines his basic understand­ ing of the nature of science, objectivity, and truth. Relying heavily on the critical method and rejection of positivism of the Southwest School of neo-Kantianism and, in particular, on Rickert’s The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, the foundation stone of Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre is grounded in his theory of objectivity, which has both epistemological and ontological implications.5 The two major components of objectivity rest in an examination of the cultural significance and meaning of particular historical events and actions and their historical causality. “Our aim is the understanding of the characteristic uniqueness of the reality in which we move. We wish to understand, on the one hand, the relationships and the cul­ tural significance of individual events in their contemporary mani­ festations and, on the other, the causes of their being historically so and not otherwise.”6 Weber is intent on integrating the methods of both understanding and explanation as he connects two traditions usually separated in neo-Kantian philosophy of science.7 And it is this attempted integration which has precipitated cries of logical in­ consistency and contradiction in the secondary literature. Reality, for Weber, has no underlying meaning or rationality. In fact, there is no nature or history in reality, and thus the relationship between the natural and social sciences can never be based on ontological differ­ ences between entities. Differences are the result of concept forma­ tion (Begrijfsbildung) based on conflicting human interests. That is, objectivity is formed by a transcendental subjectivity and its rel­ evance to values. From the neo-Kantian tradition, Weber borrows the idea that objectivity is a cultural phenomenon created from the sensuous manifold of experience by subjectively intended meaning and cultural values. From the methodological dispute in economics, he develops a theory of objectivity that is based on the method­ ological principles of ideal types, causal adequacy, objective possi­ bility, rules of evidence, testing of causal hypotheses, and empirical scientific validity.

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Though he begins to define the nature of a science of concrete reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft), Weber is working with a theory of knowledge established by Kant and Rickert. Access to reality, as the thing-in-itself, is denied to the finite mind, which constructs con­ crete reality by transforming what it sees through the categories of intuition and the concepts of the understanding. Out of the infinite possibilities of the empirical manifold available to the senses through a world that is in constant change, consciousness creates an indi­ vidual and particular moment as real—the Protestant ethic, feudal­ ism, medieval city, bureaucracy, and so forth. In both our everyday lives and in social science, objectivity or the objects of experience are constructs which transform the multiplicity of sensation into the individuality of experience. Science involves a systematical order­ ing of nature and history according to conceptual forms and analyti­ cal constructs (Gedankenbilder) created by ourselves. The very no­ tion of a market exchange presupposes complex processes in which consciousness transforms the infinite, formless matter into the fi­ nite—multiplicity into particularity. Otherwise, experience and knowledge would be impossible. Existence outside the mind is an externally infinite web of events and causes—the heterogeneous continuum, which is too complex to grasp and too broad to under­ stand. But so, too, are the possibilities of describing any particular event or object. The whole of history, as an extensively infinite mani­ fold, is unknowable, and each particular event, as an intensively infinite historical phenomenon, is also unknowable. Everything is related to everything else in an infinite number of ways.8 For Windelband, Rickert, and Weber, culture is transcendentally created by consciousness and the “relevance to values.” Weber rejects the simple correspondence theory of truth found in the empiricist theory of knowledge. Truth does not involve a correspondence between concepts and reality or a mirroring of reality in concepts. In fact, there is no presuppositionless reality. The crucial assumption of empiricist epistemology is that there is a pre-constructed ontological reality waiting to be discovered through accurate empirical descrip­ tion and the appropriate scientific method of research. But this theory of science founders on the impossibility of metaphysics and the inaccessibility and meaninglessness of a reality beyond experience. Justification for empiricism lies in a dogmatic and inflexible ontol­ ogy and logic. Kant and Rickert had built their theories of knowl­ edge on the shoulders of Hume’s skepticism and critique of indue-

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tion, and Weber continues in this direction. It is in this sense that he exclaims that “there is no absolutely ‘objective’ scientific analysis of culture.”9 By enclosing the word “objective” in inverted quotation marks, Weber draws attention to his distinctive use of the term. Objectivity is a methodological, epistemological, and ontological category within the neo-Kantian tradition. For the positivists, objectivity of method is premised on an ontological foundation of being. That is, an objec­ tive method presupposes real objects existing in a world indepen­ dent of the knower that are then reflected in perception and thought. Truth is a process of returning to the empirical foundations of senses and ideas. With the Kantian and Hegelian revolutions in transcen­ dental and dialectical logic, respectively, there is no longer any im­ mediate access to truth by a pure subject or a pure object. Objectiv­ ity is first transformed into subjective appearances and laws of physics and then becomes a phenomenological product of subjective con­ sciousness and cultural experience. The subject as knower has be­ come more historical, cultural, and social over time, and these as­ pects mediate the very structure of consciousness itself. In the end, the relationships between reality and experience, objects and con­ sciousness are reversed to reveal a striking form of methodological idealism in Weber’s writings. Weber’s early essay on objectivity contains a searing criticism of positivism through its rejection of natural science as the appropriate model for social science.10 In particular, he rejects natural science’s view of epistemology, naturalism, empirical facts, universal laws, general concepts, method of explanation, and Unitarian truth claims. There is no “objective” science of culture and history in the sense of subsuming individual events under general causal relationships and explanatory laws of history. The methodologi­ cal rules of natural science are totally inappropriate for under­ standing the uniqueness and individuality of historical objects and the meaning of culturally significant occurrences. Reality can only be understood by reason; it cannot be deduced from universal laws of history. There is no physics of history. In fact, there is no distinct or autonomous reality which history or natural science examines. Rather, like Rickert before him, Weber argues that objectivity in the cultural sciences is not discovered but formed as reality becomes a manifestation of cultural significance and mean­ ing. It is consciousness that constitutes the objects of experience

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and thought in terms of distinctive questions about the particularity or universality of empirical reality. Although in his essay, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” Weber is clearly interested in economic, social, and reli­ gious events, he is interested in them as cultural phenomena. He stresses their cultural significance for the historian as they express individually shared meanings and values in history. Thus, there may be differences of meaning for historical categories, such as market economy, on the one hand, and Christianity, the Industrial Revolu­ tion, and Protestant Reformation, on the other. The last two histori­ cal categories may have reference and validity only for the historian and not for those living during these periods because they require a historical distance from empirical reality. That is, individuals at the time may have been Protestants or Christians sharing a common set of beliefs and rituals but may not have been aware that they were part of some cultural or social change. Weber does not stop to con­ sider this issue. His emphasis is clearly on the questions of value relevance and methodology for the historian. Social science requires a different form of accessing reality and a different form of knowing based on evaluative ideas and cultural values that help delineate significant events for us. Science is al­ ways an interpretive process, weaving its way within the cultural environment of the past, looking for explanatory origins and causal connections in history. Borrowing from the neo-Kantian perspec­ tive, Weber sees that historical objects for empirical research are constructed from the infinite multiplicity of possible experience. Facts do not exist waiting to be collected inductively by the observant scientist but must await a selection process determined by human interests and cultural values that highlight certain aspects of con­ crete reality to form historical objects and individual events. Knowl­ edge is always something that arises from a particular perspective, and without this initial assumption or prejudice about what is sig­ nificant, there is no distinguishing between important and unimpor­ tant aspects of historical reality. As later post-analytic philosophers of science will argue, theory produces the facts. What we observe as fact is always filtered through a preexisting conceptual paradigm which guides the scientist in distinguishing and detecting the em­ pirical reality. Weber juxtaposes the infinite chaos of reality and the finiteness of the human mind. We can grasp only parts of the com­ plex and inexhaustible flow of life and its infinite variety by turning

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the stream of the sensuous manifold into historically specific indi­ vidual events which have relevance and value for us as social scien­ tists. This is done by means of “existential judgments” that form phenomenal appearances. Reality, as a thing-in-itself, is incompre­ hensible and meaningless; there is no hidden meaning or structure in history. In his essay, “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sci­ ences” (1906), Weber argues that the immediate present is not yet a historical object because the present is always an unhistorical occur­ rence. Objects, like historical individuals, are created through the mediation of an evaluative knower who places events within a causal nexus. This requires a future perspective from which to look back at the past. “All historical ‘evaluation’ includes, so to speak, a ‘con­ templative’ element.”11 The present cannot be an object of immedi­ ate historical contemplation but requires an evaluative perspective. In a fascinating insight, Weber likens the historical present to the objects of experience. In this one moment, he sees a relationship between the methodological difficulty of forming history, which had already been articulated by Rickert and Meyer, and the dilemma we have seen in chapter 1 of the distinction between perception and experience in the Critique o f Pure Reason. To unravel this difficulty, Weber recognizes the need to further analyze the differences be­ tween perception and knowledge, that is, to return to the differences between Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Ana­ lytic. The historical present is analogous to the category of sense perception in that both represent undeveloped forms of knowledge. Neither has been incorporated within the framework of a synthetic understanding of historical or logical categories. Cultural significance constructs historical facts. History is a selec­ tion process in which the historian chooses that which is relevant to study. Weber uses many different concepts to clarify what he means by cultural significance, including terms such as interests, values, convictions, personal beliefs, problems, ideals, evaluative ideas, prin­ ciples of selection, points of departure, and intellectual contexts. He writes that “every attempt to analyze concrete reality is absolutely meaningless”12 unless there is a prior selection of significant events and meaningful action based on the subjective values of the investi­ gator. This not only does not distort or inhibit the investigation, it is the only means by which we are able to access the richness and multiplicity of empirical reality. Otherwise, there would be so much

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information provided that there would be no mechanism by which to make sense of it. This initial selection process is necessary in order to transform the infinite complexity of reality into a manage­ able fragment of understandable events. It also gives an overall frame­ work and purpose to historical research. This is the major distin­ guishing characteristic of history and its distinctiveness compared to the natural sciences. Cultural phenomena are different from ana­ lytic laws (Gesetzesbegriffen) and thus require a radically different methodology by which we empathetically understand the meaning­ fulness of historical events and individuals. History can never be reduced to the natural sciences. The objects of historical experience are created by subjective values expressing what is important and appropriate to study. “Empirical reality becomes ‘culture’ to us be­ cause and insofar as we relate it to value ideas. It includes those segments and only those segments of reality that have become sig­ nificant to us because of this value-relevance. Only a small portion of existing concrete reality is colored by our value-conditioned in­ terest, and it alone is significant to us.”13 It is important to remember that although Weber sees social science as investigating cultural phe­ nomena, concept formation rests upon the significance of these phe­ nomena “for us” and their relation to “our values.” History is not simply a reproduction of the culture of the past in terms of its values and experiences, though they play an important role. There are as many points of access into the historical past as there are evaluative ideas that guide research. Added to the epistemological discussion about the objectivity of experience, there is a methodological question about the objectivity of method. Weber distinguishes between the “method of investiga­ tion,” which defines the conceptual schema by which the investiga­ tion is directed and the “mode of use” of the evaluative ideas and subjective framework. The former is a normative pre-judgment which forms the area of study, whereas the latter refers to the scientific norms which guide serious scholarly research. The mode of use is what today would be called the objective method used by science to which all must conform in their search for the truth about empirical reality. The choice of topic, area of investigation, and historical con­ cepts are laid out by the values of the subject, but the actual method of research must be the universal arbiter between conflicting claims of scholarship. Weber blends the particular and universal, subject and object (method) in very interesting ways. It appears that he wishes

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to salvage some traditional notion of ‘objectivity’ of method within the neo-Kantian claims of historical science. Unlike Rickert, who bases objectivity on the universality of the values chosen to form concepts, Weber places it in the rigorous method of scientific in­ quiry with its emphasis on the “inherent norms” of science as a vo­ cation, that is, honesty, integrity, scholarship, professional responsi­ bility, specialized knowledge and training, and rigorous detail.14 In his essay of 1917, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in So­ ciology and Economics,” Weber responds to a faculty discussion about whether a socialist or anarchist should be offered a teaching position at the university.15 Schmoller had argued earlier against offering chairs to Marxist professors. Weber contends that since ethical norms and beliefs offer the only avenues of access to historical ma­ terial, professors with different political values could not be excluded from the university faculty. Without ethics, there is no historical sci­ ence. But once the fundamental issues and problems have been cho­ sen, the scientific method and its professional code of behavior must override any subjectivity of beliefs. At this point, political and moral considerations have to be excluded as an objectivity of method takes over. Has Weber fallen, even unconsciously, back into a form of positivism that has already been rejected at the epistemological level, as many interpreters of his work have claimed? In the 1904 essay on objectivity, Weber introduces the method­ ological concept of “ideal types.”16 They are concepts formed through the value significance and personal perspectives of the investigator. Being theoretical abstractions and utopian categories, they possess interesting characteristics. They are the means of scientific abstrac­ tion by which historians identify particular individuals and social configurations in order to make them clear and understandable. It is neither a reflection nor description of reality but a one-sided empha­ sis that integrates many diffuse characteristics or phenomena into a unified concept about empirical reality. But they are utopian in that they do not exist in reality; they exist “no where.” They are mental constructs or heuristic devices whose purpose is to accentuate and describe complex historical events or individual actions by focusing upon their distinctive aspects and qualities. They permit us to work with a purified version of the originals in order to outline their dis­ tinctive and unusual characteristics for the purpose of more care­ fully developing hypotheses about particular historical occurrences. They are not universal in the sense of characterizing the common

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elements or abstracting from the particular components. Rather, Weber’s ideal types are a means of highlighting the most important and valuable aspects of reality for the purpose of historical inquiry. Though there are no empirical entities such as Christianity or capi­ talism, these general categories are useful in clarifying the historical distinctiveness of Western civilization. The Protestant ethic is an ideal type which stresses the theological importance of predestination, determinism, calling, asceticism, and critique of idolatry as its distinctive features. The ideal type is a syn­ thetic perspective or point of view from which the historian devel­ ops an abstraction of the essential elements of a particular historical phenomenon. “The goal of ideal-typical concept construction is al­ ways to make clearly explicit not the class or average character but rather the unique individual character of cultural phenomena.”17 To form these representations of ideas, certain aspects of reality are combined into a unified analytical construct that eliminates confus­ ing and complex empirical details. There is no reality which corre­ sponds to the concepts of the Protestant ethic or the spirit of capital­ ism. Thus, ideal types are heuristic devices that represent what is significant to us and capable of being imagined, thereby exposing reality to many different perspectives and objectively possible inter­ pretations. Most of Weber’s categories are of this type, including his concepts of individualism, feudalism, capitalism, mercantilism, and so forth. “Whoever accepts the proposition that knowledge of his­ torical reality can or should be a ‘presuppositionless’ copy of ‘ob­ jective facts,’ will deny the value of the ideal type.”18 There is no direct, unmediated access to reality. All our perceptions and knowl­ edge are filtered through historical categories which define empiri­ cal reality through its meaning and cultural significance for us. As Nietzsche, following Kant, said, there are no immaculate percep­ tions. There is no hierarchy of perspectives based on a grounding in the reality of the thing-in-itself for Weber. No basis exists for deter­ mining the priority of significance or foundational types which ex­ pose true historical reality. Weber continues this argument by informing the reader that the goal of ideal types is to make comparisons to empirical reality rel­ evant. By reality, Weber obviously cannot mean the thing-in-itself but must be referring to the historical individual formed through an evaluative idea. Though he does not mention it, it would appear that both the particular concept and the ideal type must be grounded in

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the same perspective in order to be commensurable. Ultimately, the validity of these ideal types rests on their ability to imaginatively delineate and compare essential elements in particular historical events. History is concerned with knowledge of individuality but uses generic concepts to achieve this end. Like Rickert, Weber is aware of the implications of the distinction between this method and that used by the natural sciences. Interpretation and Causality in Historical Sociology Weber’s reliance on the epistemology of neo-Kantianism provides him with a powerful critique of positivism and empiricism as he makes distinctions between a constitution and a correspondence theory of truth, the historical and natural sciences, understanding and explanation, objective possibility and universal causality, value relevance and value freedom, and cultural significance and natural laws. The dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity expressed at the methodological level between cultural significance and his­ torical fact expresses the transition from an idealist epistemology to a neo-Kantian philosophy of social science. The centerpiece of Weber’s epistemological critique of positivism lies in his rejection of the following: its ontological claims about the existence of an inde­ pendent object of experience, the separation of subjectivity and ob­ jectivity, its metaphysical realism and methodological naturalism, its use of the logic and methods of natural science, the deduction of empirical reality from universal laws, and the exhaustive explana­ tory power of universal causality. He objects to a study of history and culture that reduces meaning and significance to a system of deductive laws, which, he maintains, is the method of both classical and Marxist economics. As we have already seen in this chapter, the natural and social realities are transcendentally formed through the normative priori­ ties of their different methodologies. Natural and social phenomena are ordered according to the values of their respective sciences. Natural science explains the world through a process of selection in which empirical reality is subsumed under general concepts and laws. Historical objects are created by values relevant to the individual researcher, who attempts to understand the meaning and relevance of social institutions and events in terms of their cultural signifi­ cance. Weber is particularly concerned in his own research with the cultural relevance and significance of the market economy, espe-

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dally when the meaning of commerce and market exchange is com­ pared in modern and ancient econom ies.19 Natural science (Naturwissenschaft) deduces reality from its own laws, whereas cul­ tural science (Kulturwissenschaft) creates the cultural context within which the individuality and particularity of historical facts are ex­ amined; the former is an exact science, which eliminates the particu­ lar in favor of the universal and the latter is an interpretive science, which highlights the particularity of individual events. In contrast to economics or political science, historical reality is not derivable or explainable through universal laws of human behavior. Explanation is juxtaposed to understanding, universality to particularity, univer­ sal laws to cultural meaning. History and concrete reality disappear beneath the weight of explanatory and causal laws. The occurrences of history are understood only as the social scientist weaves his or her way through the meaning of events themselves. Concept formation and the logic of social science are built around the individuality of historical events which are not amendable to causal explanation through universal laws. But just as a description of individual events leads to an infinity of particular characteristics, so, too, does any attempt at an exhaustive causal explanation. “The number and type of causes which have influenced any given event are always infinite and there is nothing in the things themselves to set some of them apart as alone meriting attention.”20 Just as each perception and historical fact cannot mirror the infinite possibilities contained in each empirical description without presuppositions and pre-judgments, the examination of causal influences also requires a selection process. Weber joins these methodological insights with Nietzsche’s metaphysics of becoming and order. Causality has the same epistemological status as historical facts. Both are made up of an infinite amount of descriptive information and thus can never be exhaustively analyzed in an existential judgment about empirical reality. Both require a selection process in which a significant part of that reality is chosen to form an empirical individual with its histori­ cal origins. Causality, too, is a culturally evaluative idea constructed upon the logical priority of what Weber calls “causal adequacy” and “objective possibility.” “An exhaustive causal investigation of any concrete phenomena in its full reality is not only practically impos­ sible—it is simply nonsense.”21 Applying the criteria of positivistic laws, universal validity, and abstract concepts to history produces only meaningless categories that distort the complexity of a histori-

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cally concrete and complex reality. On the other hand, Weber does not reject general concepts, laws, or causality in the study of history but sees them as a different logical type. And laws are only a prolegomena to any future historical analysis based on the cultural and causal significance of historical entities.22 Causality becomes a means to further emphasize the distinctive­ ness of a unique individual or concrete event. Weber is after specific concrete causes, not nomological causes that reflect the general ex­ pectations of relevant effects anticipated from certain causes. That is, he is concerned with developing a cultural science which pro­ duces knowledge of adequate causation. This type of knowledge, with a texture and diversity unknown in the natural sciences, re­ quires a comprehensive understanding of historical reality in order to obtain the fullest appreciation of essential features of particular events. The more abstract and general the categories, the less com­ prehensive and more vague the picture of reality. This seems to echo Nietzsche’s epistemology of perspectivism and his call that we look at reality from various points of view. Throughout his work much of Weber’s criticism of Marxism represents both a rejection of monocausal relationships found in the materialistic conception of history and also a rejection of the ahistorical deduction of cultural phenom­ ena from economic relationships, which destroys the uniqueness of historical events. Weber’s critique of Marxism is based not upon its underlying existential value judgments but rather on its social policy, explanatory predictions, and positivist science. Following closely the methodological work of the prominent his­ torian Eduard Meyer in his Zur Theorie und Methodik der Geschichte (1900), Weber continues to develop his analysis of the logic of the cultural sciences. In his essay, “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences,” he expands his ideas on causality and laws within his neo-Kantian critique of historical reason by responding to Meyer’s work. A first impression upon reading this essay is that Weber may have been unduly influenced by the natural sciences with their em­ phasis on causality and explanatory understanding of history.23 A closer look, however, reveals that Weber’s concern with the issue of causality is simply an extension of his investigation into the logic of concept formation based on cultural significance and historical in­ terests. Placing the historical event within a causal framework only highlights its singularity and uniqueness from the totality of infinite historical possibilities and the unending flow of becoming. Weber’s

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theory of causality is derived not from an explanatory science with its method of abstraction from concrete reality. Rather, he uses it as a mechanism to further distinguish the individuality and uniqueness of historical phenomena. Weber recognizes throughout his writings the relationship between perception and history; both express similar epistemological prob­ lems of forming objects and facts through evaluation. He further ties this relationship together by arguing that just as in everyday life we decide a course of action by weighing possible choices against their expected consequences, so, too, the historian must examine history by connecting actions to consequences, causes to effects in order to determine which antecedent causes were historically crucial to an event. In this process of historical reconstruction, the researcher is able to determine more adequately the particular significance of an action or event by its effects. If a historical fact is imagined as absent or altered and there is no apparent change in subsequent events, then it can be argued that the fact is insignificant to the explanation of a particular historical occurrence. Weber calls this “the judgment of possibility.” On the other hand, if the event cannot be imagined without the antecedent occurrence, then we know that it is his­ torically significant. The analyst reconstructs history in a variety of ways to determine the significance and necessity of particular events within the complex flow of time. Weber calls this histori­ cal imagination and counterfactual reconstruction a theory of “ob­ jective possibility.”24 He reports that he borrows this methodologi­ cal concept not from the natural sciences but from Johannes von Kries’s work on criminology and jurisprudence, Prinzipien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, and applies it to the issue of histori­ cal causality. In law, causality is crucial for the determination of guilt and punishment since it shows the relation between an illegal action and its criminal consequences. Weber states quite clearly that the underlying methodological issues of historical significance and cau­ sality are the same as those of punishment in criminal law and in­ demnity in civil law.25 Weber realizes that there are an infinite number of trivial details and causal connections, and it is the role of the scientist to organize these elements into a coherent and systematic order through inter­ ests and causal explanations “exactly in the same way as the judge’s deliberations take into account not the total individualized course of the events of the case but rather those components of the events

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which are pertinent for subsumption under the legal norms.”26 The judge abstracts from all aesthetic, historical, scientific, and physi­ ological factors that do not relate to his concerns about the criminal nature of the action in terms of cause and effect. Also he considers the criminal action in terms of the subjective awareness and inten­ tions of the individual performing the act. The judge uses this method as a heuristic device to highlight only those relevant features and causes which warrant criminal guilt and punishment. Everything else is trivial and meaningless from this perspective. The historian also abstracts from an infinity of possible causal relations in order to fo­ cus on only those concrete causes and effects that are relevant for an understanding of history. This is where the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge again becomes important. Pure description and collec­ tion of facts are logically incapable of organizing the material around historical causes and concrete events. Just as with Kant’s theory of perception and experience, the logical issue for Weber is the relation between historical objects and causal explanation. The objectivity and reality of everyday life and historical experience are formed through the active intervention and selective abstraction of subjec­ tive consciousness. “The ‘experience,’ when it is made into an ‘ob­ ject,’ acquires perspectives and interrelationships which were not ‘known’ in the experience itself.” A few pages later Weber continues this idea when he writes that “all our ‘knowledge’ is related to a categorically formed reality, and that, for example, ‘causality’ is a category of ‘our’ thought.”27 At this point in his analysis of the question of historical causality, Weber borrows an example from Meyer’s work. How important were the Persian Wars and the battle of Marathon to the development of Hellenic culture—Greek tragedy, historiography, and philosophy? If the Greeks had lost the battle or if the battle had never taken place, Greek civilization could have turned into a Persian theocracy. This would have been an adequate inference and consequence to draw from a Persian victory based on probable outcomes and accumu­ lated experience of Persian foreign policy in Jerusalem, Egypt, and Asia Minor, as well as an adequate judgment of cause and effect. Therefore, both Meyer and Weber argue that this thought experi­ ment creates alternative possibilities and adequate causes using the method of objective possibility and reveals just how important this singular event was to both Greek and Western history.28 Otherwise, they argue, the battle of Marathon would have no more importance

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than a conflict between two unknown and irrelevant tribes of people. According to Weber, historical reality is formed through “imagina­ tive constructs” and counterfactual models which distinguish be­ tween the important and unimportant events, chance, and adequate causes in history. Anticipating Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by 150 years, Weber approvingly quotes Goethe’s state­ ment that theory precedes fact. Historical consciousness, individual perspectives, and professional judgments are the empirical rules and forms through which history is created. The method of objective possibility is neither a philosophy of history nor a history of objec­ tive necessity.29 This process of creating ideal or alternative histori­ cal possibilities is logically analogous to his theory of unreal or uto­ pian ideal types. Weber is in agreement with Rickert here. As in the case of natural science, cultural science also uses abstract and gen­ eral concepts, but for purposes of individualization and not univer­ salization. Kantian Nihilism and the Critique of Reason Nietzsche’s metaphysics of becoming and critique of the philoso­ phy of being permeate Weber’s methodological writings.30 In fact, the formal and logical structure of the cultural sciences is juxtaposed to the chaos and flow of life that remind the reader of Nietzsche’s distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian drives. Culture and science are viewed by Weber as part of this unending flow, which for a time is captured by a one-sided emphasis on particular quali­ ties that give meaning and relevance to historical analysis. Histori­ cal configurations are created by cultural categories out of the inde­ scribable infinite. Becoming is transformed into transitory and static being, reality into concept, history into culture by means of human interests. The system of analytical ideas of the ideal types corre­ sponds to the Apollonian dimension in that, for both Nietzsche and Weber, cultural forms momentarily halt the inevitable stream of life. Without these concepts and forms, life is inarticulate, unorganized, meaningless, and absurd. “‘Culture’ is a finite segment of the mean­ ingless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.”31 Weber does not borrow the metaphysics of suffering or the ontol­ ogy of the abyss from Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. Instead he ap­ propriates their Kantian view that meaning is ultimately given through the autonomous and self-defining subject. It is here that

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Kantian epistemology and Nietzschean metaphysics are combined in Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre. Knowledge is wrested from history by historical consciousness, and it is through the conflict between becoming and being that cultural science is formed. History is the process of the ever-changing formulation and reformulation, solu­ tion and dissolution of the conceptual order. This perpetual recon­ struction of reality by cultural science parallels Nietzsche’s under­ standing of history as the continuous reordering of reality through the dialectic between Apollo and Dionysus. Since no analytical sys­ tem can capture reality, since becoming is ever elusive of being, and since concepts capture only a small moment of time and space, his­ tory as time and concept changes continuously. Reformulations cre­ ate conceptual configurations that allow us to make sense of reality for another generation and another culture with their differing val­ ues and problems. Weber is repeating Nietzsche’s ideas about the “delight of exist­ ence” and the “immense lust for life” found in The Birth of Tragedy. Dionysian wisdom of the tragic looks behind the phenomena to the continuous flow of life. This knowledge “makes us realize that ev­ erything that is generated must be prepared to face its painful disso­ lution.”32 There is nothing permanent, including the phenomenal world of appearances constructed by philosophical and scientific rationalism with their categories of being, essence, reality, time, space, and causality. Life is always changing and with it the categories we use to give it temporary order and purpose. The metaphysical solace created by the illusions of concepts helps us bear the horrors of indi­ vidual existence without going mad. We become part of the oneness of primal Being with its inexpressible “hunger for existence.” The joy of existence and participation in this never-ending succession of appearances makes us happy. The progress of modern science with its confidence in technical control and progress hides this painful reality of death from us by creating a world of eternal truths that protect us from any tragic wisdom. But with Kant and Schopenhauer, with their critiques of reason and their recognition of the limits of science, with the distinctions between the Mayan appearances and the thing-in-itself, and with their rejection of optimism and the uni­ versality of the laws of reason and science, a rediscovery of the Dionysian in the modern world is again made possible. Weber accepts Nietzsche’s metaphysics of life—the perpetual conflict between form and matter, being and becoming, Apollo and

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Dionysus—his Kantian theory of knowledge with its perspectivism, nihilism, and relativism, and his moral philosophy with its underly­ ing character of individual freedom and self-determination.33 But this complex integration of epistemology, anthropology, moral phi­ losophy, and metaphysics results at times in a confusing array of methodological positions on Weber’s part. It is in this light that his theory of value freedom should be understood. Some have argued that the concept of value freedom expresses the methodological imperative of positivism for a neutral, value-free science (T. Parsons and R. Aron); others contend that the separation of science from ethics was meant to protect the polytheism of ethics from the in­ fringements of bourgeois science (G. Stauth); still others maintain that it was meant as a critique of the underlying values and meta­ physics of Enlightenment science (F. Ringer); and, finally, it has been put forward that Weber was articulating a defense of “classical po­ litical science” and intellectual freedom with the Greek ideal of Menschentum, rational self-realization, and a humanistic science of mankind (W. Hennis).34 The call for value freedom appears to rep­ resent a rejection of the one-dimensional values of positivism—natu­ ralism or the search for universal laws, realism or a copy theory of reality, the historical determinism of predictive science, and the ra­ tionalization of the sociological method. It is also a reaffirmation of the values of pluralism, diversity, and the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge and value. The metaphysics and nihilism of Nietzsche are subtly incorpo­ rated into the methodology of Weber, especially his theory of value freedom in cultural science. In his early essay on objectivity, Weber writes, “It can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms and ideals from which directives for immediate prac­ tical activity can be derived.”35 In a later speech, “Science as a Vo­ cation,” delivered to a liberal student organization at the University of Munich in 1917, Weber argues that there are clear reasons for this separation of ethics (Werturteil) and science. He rejects the idea that the academy should become a platform for a political prophet or demagogue. In defending his position, he puts forth a number of pedagogical arguments: fear of domination in the classroom and the need for pluralism and diversity of values within the academy; the disenchantment of science, its rules of logic, and its method of em­ pirical analysis and causal explanation; the polytheism of warring gods and value systems; the inability to derive or refute ethics through

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science; and the nature of the different goals of political leaders and academic teachers. In the final analysis, Weber’s comments in this speech are not related to epistemology but to issues of theory and practice, that is, social policy.36 For the most part, his criticisms are leveled against intellectual moralizing and preaching, academic prophecy, social policy, political indoctrination, and student confor­ mity. But if value relevance plays such an important epistemologi­ cal role in neo-Kantian concept formation and objectivity, and if Weber’s defense of Marxists and anarchists in the academy is to be taken seriously, then there clearly is a place for ethical and political values in empirical research. The traditional division between ethics and research must be re­ thought. As Wolfgang Mommsen realizes, empirical research may be directed by the values of either maximum productivity and effi­ ciency or social justice and economic redistribution. There is a spe­ cific relationship between ethics and science; ethics may influence the choice of topic and the objectivity of concept formation. Follow­ ing the neo-Kantian philosophy of cultural science, values are es­ sential to the abstraction from the infinite manifold of experience and to the subjective selection of a topic, as well as to the formation of social concepts and the constitution of the historical object.37 This must be clearly stated by the investigator and must not influence the actual collection of historical information during the research pro­ cess.38 The real issue then is when and how values should be intro­ duced, not if values should be introduced. Weber seems to argue, though not clearly, that they enter into the initial stages of defining the concepts and parameters of a research project. However, the re­ search, once undertaken, must not be swayed or distorted by values themselves. An examination of the class structure and forms of ex­ ploitation in nineteenth-century factories in Manchester is a relevant and legitimate area of social inquiry. It cannot, however, influence the actual collection and organization of historical and sociological information. Let us take another example closer to home. In order to undertake an analysis of the American welfare state in the last few decades of the twentieth century, we openly recognize the values that direct our research. That is, the values will direct us in a certain way. Should we look for the historical origins of the crisis of the welfare state in the cultural values and diminishing expectations and effort of the poor, the lack of socialization and education of those at the bottom

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of the economic rung, or in the economic structure, class divisions, and political oppression of the poor in American society? How and where we look are determined by our political values and views of the system. Whether we investigate the welfare state in the manner of conservatives Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead, liberals David Ellwood and Sheldon Danziger, or radicals David Gordon, Frances Piven, and Richard Cloward does not necessarily affect the objec­ tivity or scientific quality of the work. The political orientation merely helps us raise certain questions that become the framework for our sociological analysis of the state. H. H. Bruun maintains that Weber was aware “that the personal preferences of the scholar are important to the selection of value relations, so important, in fact, that these preferences may influence the way in which a whole generation formulates its problems.”39 For Weber, in contrast to Rickert, the general validity of values rests with the individual and not with the cultural norms of the commu­ nity. What is inappropriate is to distort the collection and interpreta­ tion of empirical data based on valued-ladened pre-conceptions or anticipations of the empirical findings. Research should have an in­ tegrity independent of valuation itself. Once value relevance and the topic selection have occurred, the research project itself must be governed by the personal integrity, professional values, and rational method of the scientist. At this point, clearly formulated sociological concepts, logical reasoning, the rules of evidence, causal explana­ tion, and empirical validation frame the methodological objectivity of the scientific investigation. This is why Weber separates his neoKantian theory of value from his articulation of the historical method. And it is this very separation of epistemology and methodology that has given rise to the complex myriad of debates surrounding the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in his Wissenschaftslehre. This also explains his own separation of fact and value, while at the same time providing some of the most insightful criticisms of West­ ern rationalization. The end result is that social critique is not ex­ cluded by the Weberian method. It merely takes a different form. Weber rejects a connection between ethics and science not on the grounds of an epistemological theory of objectivity, neutrality, or the truth of the scientific method. Rather, he sees ethics as a form of politics and is genuinely concerned about the nature of political knowledge and discourse with its appropriate avenues of expres­ sion in public arenas, essays, churches, party gatherings, and so forth.

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Because of the unlimited power of the professor in the classroom, there is no real possibility for discussion, no serious opposition to his or her point of view, no alternative perspectives, and no space for critical evaluation. Therefore, the introduction of a professor’s personal values and judgments is totally unwarranted. Weber’s ma­ jor criticism of deriving ethical values from science is reserved for his view of the underlying nihilism of values, as expressed in his statement that “‘scientific’ pleading is meaningless in principle be­ cause the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other.”40 Referring to James Mill, Weber contends that grounding knowledge in experience results in agnosticism and nominalism. Weber also borrows from Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power with its moral self-determination beyond good and evil. There are no universal foundations to moral philosophy other than the self-legislative capability of the striving will. “We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense.”41 Just as the Greeks sac­ rificed to their competing gods, the moderns, too, have their own pantheon of ethical and political values. We live in a disenchanted world of mechanical science. We fare no better in choosing among the conflicting gods in our polytheism. Only prophets, not profes­ sors, theologians not scientists, can mediate between the gods and make choices about which should have priority. Before the profound questions of the meaning of human existence, science remains si­ lent. Quoting from Tolstoy, Weber agrees that science is meaning­ less because it cannot answer the ultimate questions about the pur­ pose and goals of life. “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’”42 The distinction Weber raises between value relevance and value freedom lies not in a distinction between concept formation deter­ mined by personal significance and the objectivity of the scientific method. Rather the distinction rests on the needs of concept forma­ tion and moral nihilism. Value freedom, as some secondary inter­ preters of Weber have argued, should be more correctly translated as freedom from values. That is, Weber’s call for apparent neutrality is based not on positivistic prejudices but on his fundamental insight into Nietzsche’s worldview. Ethical relativism and pedagogical re­ straint, not methodological objectivity or epistemological neutrality, produce the call for value freedom. Because no personal value is

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privileged, science cannot make ethical and political choices. Fi­ nally, Weber maintains that professing in the classroom reveals a lack of integrity and courage by the teacher since students are con­ demned to silence by their subservient positions. However, peda­ gogy should not be confused with epistemology in his social meth­ odology or theory of value. Weber’s existential and nihilist claims to a freedom from values should not be transformed into a false posi­ tivistic objectivity. Rationalization and Disenchantment of Science and Method Though clearly separating ethics and social policy initiatives, val­ ues and action, Weber does leave an opening for another way to integrate ethics and science. Though rejecting the application of personal convictions and political values during lectures in the class­ room and in the direction of future action through public policy, he does not eliminate ethics entirely from the cultural sciences. He does permit its entry into the area of social critique when critique is di­ rected at the totality of modem civilization and the process of ratio­ nalization. The centerpiece of Weber’s historical and social writings lies in his theory of rationalization and the ethical distinction be­ tween substantive and formal rationality. This theory presents an interesting opportunity to approach the issue of his methodology from a different perspective. Rationalization refers to the growing disenchantment, depersonalization, specialization, and domination found within the values and institutions of modernity. More specifi­ cally, it refers to a specific form of science and reason that has evolved around the logical imperatives of technical control, instrumental ra­ tionality (Zweckrationalitat), machinelike predictability, productive efficiency, and the administrative organization of a disciplined bu­ reaucracy.43 These values have permeated all aspects of economic production, political administrations, legal bureaucracy, social in­ teraction, and the cultural values of modernity. And it is science which best articulates the values of rationalization. In describing the main characteristics of Western science, Weber writes that its distinctiveness lies in its method of thinking and orga­ nizing experience, on the one hand, and in “controlling life by cal­ culating external objects as well as man’s activities,”44 on the other. Science has developed into a technique for mastering and control­ ling life through technical reason. In the process, it has disenchanted human life by reducing universal truth to a means of calculability,

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efficiency, and productivity. The result for Western civilization has been an iron cage which believes itself to be the highest form of human evolution. In actuality, modern society is locked into a cul­ ture and set of social institutions which are incapable of providing answers to the fundamental questions about the meaning and pur­ pose of human existence. Humanity is enclosed in the immediate present without goals or directions in a life surrounded by a quanti­ tative world of Enlightenment calculation and control that we no longer understand. We live in a homeless society without a soul. In an interesting section of “Science as a Vocation,” Weber briefly outlines the history of Western thought by tracing alternative views of rationality and science that have existed since Greek philosophy. In highlighting the distinctive characteristics of modern rationality, he offers us insights into competing claims to rationality that form his distinction between substantive (Wertrationalitat) and formal ra­ tionality (Zweckrationalitdt). Weber argues that throughout the cen­ turies there have been various attempts to define science (Wissenschaft) and universal truth in terms of philosophical contem­ plation, rational experimentation and art, pietist theology, utilitarian moral philosophy, and natural science. He begins with an examina­ tion of the seventh book of Plato’s Republic. In terminology remi­ niscent of Schopenhauer’s integration of Platonic philosophy and Hindu contemplative resignation, Weber examines the philosopher’s quest for substantive reason in the form of true being. Sitting in the dark cave chained with his back to the fire, watching the shadowy figures thrown upon the wall by the flickering light, the philosopher eventually turns around and discovers the truth about the figures. They are mere illusions and deceptions—’’lifeless ghosts”—from which he escapes over time by finding his way to the surface and the sunlight above. From this perspective, modem science is entrapped in the cave and has mistaken the phenomenal shadows on the wall for reality, thereby destroying the expanse and excitement of life itself. Even in this search for true being in philosophical contemplation, Weber can­ not escape his own interests in Plato’s discovery of the technical tools of the concept and the dialectic. But these new tools and logi­ cal method were to be used in the search for the eternal principles of beauty, justice, courage, and the good which could direct Hellenic man to the virtuous life of the citizen within the polis. The next paradigmatic shift occurs for Weber in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the

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Greek spirit. In its search for truth through art and rational experi­ ment, the Renaissance was the second great historical period for the celebration of science. Art became a science as it sought true being in nature. During the sixteenth century, the Protestants attempted to use theology to provide humanity with access to God, reality, and meaning. God’s providence and rationality, as well as the path to Him were revealed to natural science in the undiscovered secrets of nature. It was here, too, that the meaning of the world would also become known. Weber expresses it in his blending of religion and natural science: “Science is a way to God.” The final stage in the evolution of scientific inquiry is that of the “last man,” a reference from the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which his coming is prophesied. The last man refers to the type of utilitarian individual who resides in modern liberalism and who, having lost the Dionysian urges for chaos and creativity, has forgot­ ten to strive beyond himself; he is an individual who places priority on pleasure and materialism and has forgotten how to revaluate all value and redefine life in terms of the will to power. “Alas,” writes Nietzsche, “the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself.”45 Modernity is forging a new type of person who is immune to these desires to give birth to a dancing star, who knows nothing of love, creation, or longing. He represents a form of humanity which reduces happiness and love to utility; community and friendship to warmth and security; striving and effort to conformity and moderation; morality to calculus; high­ est hopes to social adaptation; and skepticism and suspicion to truth and cleverness. “Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”46 Happi­ ness, contentment, satisfaction, and adjustment to life are the prod­ ucts of this coming culture. This last individual is the scientist who through the calculation and mastery of life creates a world of opti­ mism, progress, and happiness. This is the “specialist without spirit, the sensualist without heart,”47 who inhabits a world without mean­ ing or purpose—a nihilistic world in which the absurdity of exist­ ence is hidden behind the Mayan veil of science and utility. Zarathustra has come to the mass of assembled people to tell them about the coming future, but they only jeer and laugh at him. Rationalization permeates all aspects of modern institutions and cultural values, including concept formation and method of the so-

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cial sciences. In “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” Weber examines this historical process in relation to economics, which he recognizes contains two fundamental orientations. First, its philo­ sophical foundations rest on the anthropological and ethical assump­ tions of eighteenth-century rationalism and the natural rights tradi­ tion. Second, it is viewed as a technique for the mastery of social reality and the efficient and productive creation of material wealth for the general population. Weber is aware that the philosophical and technical optimism underlying economics also obscures the prob­ lematic nature of the new discipline, which relies so intimately on the method and concept formation of the natural sciences. Its main characteristics are scientific objectivity, universal validity, techno­ logical rationality, utilitarian applicability, and mathematical organi­ zation of social reality. It creates a new metaphysics of the social reality based on the foundations of the methodological abstractions and universal laws of the natural sciences. The normative ground of this new form of knowledge is the instrumental control over the hu­ man and physical environment through the creation of a new form of social technology with its natural laws of supply and demand and economic behaviorism. This is certainly not the world of the cultural and historical sciences, which are built upon the integration of sci­ ence and meaning. Weber’s summary of the methodological origins of economics recapitulates the rationalization of science in modernity. From its early beginnings in the intellectual wonder among the ancient Greeks and its development in the art and experimentation of the Renais­ sance and the pietism of the Protestant Reformation to modem utili­ tarianism and natural science, there is a progressive narrowing and rationalization of the concept of science (Wissenschaft) to the meth­ odology of physics and chemistry. Science has escaped from the search for meaning in true form and being, beauty, art, God, and personal happiness. Technological mastery is the only normative guiding principle of modem science as it leads to the rationalization of science and split between science and ethics. The broader inter­ pretation of reason as a comprehensive science encompassing phi­ losophy and metaphysics, ethics and politics, art and values, theol­ ogy and God has been reduced to a mechanism for the technical control and administration of the world. The distinctions between value relevance and value freedom, substantive and formal rational­ ity are lost, and reason is reduced to a reified objectivity and me-

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chanical device; episteme is reduced to techne and utility; knowl­ edge to instrumental control over the environment; and wisdom to clever mastery and domination of the market and society. This be­ comes the basis for Weber’s critique of modernity and economics with its truncation of reason to a very narrow definition of truth based on a naturalistic dogma. All the social problems faced by humanity are reduced to particular problems amendable to technical manipu­ lation and solution by subsuming specific issues under universally valid laws of cause and effect. The final result, according to Weber, is that “it appeared as if there was in general no conceivable mean­ ing of scientific work other than the discovery of the laws of events. Only those aspects of phenomena which were involved in the ‘laws’ could be essential from the scientific point of view...”48 Under this method, phenomena which are distinct individual events are not considered part of science. W eber’s own methodology and Wissenschaftslehre do not fall under the disenchantment and ratio­ nalization of the world as he characterizes it. He rejects this rational­ ization when applied to the cultural sciences but continues to main­ tain the separation of science and ethics because of his Nietzschean pluralism. His defense of the cultural sciences is thus a result of the successful resistance of German Idealism, neo-Kantianism, and the Historical School of economics to positivism and to their epistemo­ logical and methodological reflections on the nature of science, eth­ ics, and history. The exciting implications of Weber’s theory of Western rational­ ity, with its distinction between formal and substantive rationality, critique of rationalization and the iron cage, and appreciation of al­ ternative forms of reason and science in the history of Western thought, do not, however, materialize in his own social theory and historical sociology. Weber never develops or expands these insights into a comprehensive critique of modernity. One reason for his re­ luctance may have been the very separation and indifference of eth­ ics and science that is so prominent throughout his writings. The radical application of this material into a comprehensive social cri­ tique had to wait for the members of the Frankfurt School who would later integrate Weber with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. It is very interesting that with the rejection of the traditional view of positivistic objectivity, the goal of scientific inquiry is not a pic­ ture-perfect knowledge of reality but a knowledge which, in the lan­ guage of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, expands the inner life

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and spiritual horizon of the individual.49 Weber admits that in the end history is an aesthetic experience (or Dionysian insight) which broadens our understanding of the ethical and intellectual creations of humanity over time. And from the plethora of his approaches to rationalization, religion, and the rise of capitalism evolved the rich­ ness of the different methodologies of historical, structural, and in­ terpretive sociology. German Historical School and Nineteenth-Century Methodenstreit The famous nineteenth-century methodological dispute known as the Methodenstreit, between the Austrian School of marginal util­ ity analysis and the German Historical School of economics, cen­ tered on the nature of science, causality, validation, and history.50 The debate began in the early 1880s with an exchange between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmollen Professor of economics at the Uni­ versity of Vienna, Menger was the founder of the Austrian Marginalist School of economic positivism, which included other European no­ tables such as Leon Walras, W. S. Jevons, and Eugen BöhmBawerk.51 Schmoller was founder of the Verein für Sozialpolitik and the major representative of the Younger Historical School, a collec­ tion of moderate reformers attempting to integrate ethics and social science. It was Menger’s contention that economics must become a theoretical science and that the Historical School mistook economic history for economic theory. In 1883 he published a book entitled Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der Politischen Ökonomie insbesondere (Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences), which was critically reviewed by Schmoller in his journal Schmollers Jahrbuch fü r Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft. Menger replied in sixteen polemi­ cal letters to a friend that were later published in 1884 in Die Irrthümer des Historismus in der Deutschen Nationalökonomie (The Error of Historicism in the German Economy).52 It was in the context of this debate between the two schools of economic thought that Weber developed his own theory of historical sociology mediated by the works of Kant, Rickert, and Nietzsche. Schmoller was the chief spokesperson for the younger second generation of the Historical School, which included Lujo Brentano and Werner Sombart; its older members included Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, and Karl Knies. Roscher’s Outlines o f Lectures

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on Political Economy (1843) and Knies’s Political Economy from the Historical Point of View (1853), which were influential on Weber while he was still a university student, represent the first key works of the Historical School.53 Its empiricist method was aimed at a de­ scriptive study of collective and organic entities, such as the na­ tional economy and social institutions, in an attempt to derive his­ torical, relative, and comparative empirical generalizations. Mem­ bers of the Historical School rejected the use of abstract atomism and methodological individualism, theoretical realism, and the “re­ alist-empirical method” of the natural sciences, as well as the possi­ bility of establishing absolute and transcendent laws of economics.54 Menger, on the other hand, used a rationalist method and timeless ideal types to abstract and highlight essential forms and universal relationships in individual phenomena in order to deduce from these “simple elements” more complicated phenomena and exact laws of historical development.55 Weber writes essays on both Roscher and Knies as he attempts to define his own position within this dispute over methods in the nine­ teenth century. He borrows freely from both schools as he weaves his way through their at times abstract and abstruse discussions. From Menger he emphasizes the issue of methodological individualism and economic types as theoretical abstractions, whereas from Schmoller he accepts the notion of empirical causal laws and his critique of universal economic laws based on the model of the natu­ ral sciences. Thus, from both Schmoller’s economic theory and Rickert’s theory of knowledge, Weber develops a powerful critique of neo-classical economics and positivism in the social sciences. His understanding of empirical laws is further informed by Rickert’s notion of the infinite universe and the conceptual construction of reality through historical reason. Although both Menger and Schmoller searched for economic laws, the real debate was over the nature of the method and ontology of these laws. Menger argued that economic laws reflected the essen­ tial laws of nature and universal forces in history, whereas Schmoller contended that they reflected only unique causal relationships be­ tween particular historical events. They represented the different sides of the positivist debate over the nature of social science—the ratio­ nalism, deductive logic, and explanatory economics of Menger’s naturalism and universalism and the empiricism and induction of Schmoller’s historical research.56 The neo-classical Marginalist

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School attempted to build universal causal laws and objective valid­ ity on the model of both the nomological laws of the natural sci­ ences and the egoistic psychology of the classical economic theory of Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus. The Historical School, on the other hand, drew its inspiration from the German Romantic movement with its stress on the unique individual, the ethical, and the histori­ cal. The debate was over whether economics was a nomothetic theo­ retical science or an idiographic historical science.57 It is in the con­ text of this methodological debate that Weber’s own methodological writings are to be understood. In a metatheoretical monograph on Roscher and Knies which is chronologically sandwiched around his essay on objectivity (1904), Weber enters this historical dispute and develops his response to the older members of the Historical School.58 Originally begun in 1902 as a work on historical economics for a Festschrift in Heidelberg, the monograph appears as separate essays in Schmollers Jahrbuch. In 1903 he publishes an essay on Roscher’s historical method and in 1905 and 1906 publishes two essays on Knies and the problem of irrational­ ity in the social sciences. These three essays represent Weber’s first attempts to clarify and resolve the methodological dispute in the so­ cial sciences and reject positivism as the appropriate foundation for the study of society and history. Weber had been a student of Knies at the University of Heidelberg in 1882 and years later in 1896 replaced him as professor of economics.59 The essays are very difficult and chal­ lenging to read. Weber shows how the split between the German and Austrian schools of economics does not divide neatly along the split between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften. Both Roscher and Knies articulate the transcendental particularity and herme­ neutical distinctiveness of the social sciences in neo-Kantian form. However, in the same breath that Roscher defends a confusing mix­ ture of sociological mysticism, metaphysical obscurantism, and Hegelian metaphysics, Knies defends scientific abstractions, empirical generalizations, and nomological laws of natural science. Weber draws from both schools of thought as he attempts to develop a science of concrete reality which interprets the cultural significance of historical events, as well as their causal relationships. Blending the approaches of understanding and explanation (verstehende Erklärung) as meaning­ ful causality and relationships (,Sinnzusammenhänge), Weber must steer for his methodological life between the dangerous whirlpool of Scylla and the deadly cliffs of Charybdis.60

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In the first essay of his Wissenschaftslehre, “Roscher’s Historical Method” (1903), Weber undertakes a critical analysis of Roscher’s taxonomy of the sciences and logic of the historical method.61 He is aware of the inconsistencies, obscurities, and irrelevancies of Roscher’s methodological work for his own time. Roscher’s reflec­ tions on metatheory contain a fascinating but confusing mixture of ideas on jurisprudence, metaphysics, organismic physiology, and intuitable totalities that bring together his historical method and posi­ tivist science. But his writings provide Weber with a starting point that makes his own methodological writings appear clearer and more organized and systematic. He begins by outlining Roscher’s distinc­ tion between two different sciences based on their distinctive logical methods and theories of concept formation—the philosophical and the historical. Philosophical science is a nomological science, which attempts to explain reality through abstract concepts and universal laws that leave behind the contingent and particular. Like Rickert, Roscher accepts the infinite multiplicity of reality that science must organize through its complex set of principles and laws seeking uni­ versal applicability and validity. The distinctive and qualitative as­ pects of concrete reality are reduced to quantitative measurements and mathematical equations that produce universal causal laws. Re­ moteness from empirical reality, reduction of reality to measurable features, and the contentless character of its abstract categories trans­ form the uniqueness and particularity of the changing world into meaningless phenomena expressing universal and generic features. The philosophical sciences search for the essential in phenomena. Historical science, on the other hand, seeks an understanding of concrete reality and knowledge of its peculiarities and distinctive qualitative properties. Roscher rejects the idea, however, that his­ tory can simply reproduce reality because of its unlimited possibili­ ties and infinite differentiations. This form of science can never be exhaustive but must intuitively select the essential aspects of the past. Historical concepts are thus representations or phenomena of the concrete real world based on the essential characteristics and individual peculiarities of their properties. These concepts have lim­ ited extension or abstraction but are full of content, which carries historical significance and meaning. A difficulty arises, however, once Weber has clearly laid out the basic methodological and logical differences between the two sci­ ences. The clear distinctions begin to break down quickly. He real-

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izes that there are apparent logical inconsistencies and methodological flaws in Roscher’s philosophy of historical economics. Roscher never grounds his methodological analysis in any comprehensive theory of knowledge; he does not develop the implications of the differ­ ences between the philosophical and historical sciences; and does not clarify the meaning of his basic hermeneutical categories of con­ crete reality, significance, interest, understanding, meaning, and so forth.62 A surprising point is reached when Roscher summarizes his goal of historical science as the formulation of the “natural laws” of economics based on abstract concepts and analytical, nomological laws which would eliminate all contingent reality from economics. Economics examines causal relations and essential properties for the purpose of establishing empirical generalizations, nomological regularities, and evolutionary laws of historical change. “Genuine ‘natural laws’ of the behavior of phenomena can be formulated only on the basis of analytical abstractions which eliminate the ‘histori­ cally contingent’” by means of “a system of abstract concepts and analytical laws.”63 This appears, on the surface, to be in direct con­ tradiction to Roscher’s original definition of historical science as a science which describes the essential properties of qualitative reality and the irrational actions of the free will. Weber rejects Roscher’s theory of historical science as “empirically impossible” and “logi­ cally absurd.” He never wavers from his earlier insight that the re­ duction of empirical reality to “laws” is meaningless. However, he is willing to accept historical laws that are arrived at through the method of causal adequacy and objective possibility.64 Weber is quick to point out that Roscher rejects a naturalistic subsumption of the his­ torically unique and the scientific deduction of practical norms. That is, Roscher accepts the centrality of the form and logic of nomologi­ cal laws, while rejecting the naturalism and positivism of the marginalist theory of economics. This makes the distinction between the Austrian School of marginalists and the Historical School more difficult to explain and maintain.65 To help unravel some of the difficulties in Roscher’s methodologi­ cal writings, Weber turns to their source in the German Historical School of jurisprudence. Criticizing legal rationalism and the En­ lightenment view of law, this school of thought developed an al­ ternative view based on the concept of Volksgeist. Concrete laws are not rationally deduced from abstract legal principles but derived from the irrational spirit of the cultural community as it evolves over time.

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These manifestations of the Volksgeist are meaningful and signifi­ cant concrete cultural elements which are expressed in general con­ cepts and lawlike, universal patterns of development. The Volksgeist as “idea” is not a nominalist abstraction formed from cultural par­ ticulars but is itself a homogeneous metaphysical entity from which particular laws, culture, and language emanate. It is also a creation of God expressing nomological necessity and empirical regularity. Weber refers to it as an “intuitable totality, the cultural bearer of a meaningful total essence.”66 Roscher borrows freely from Hegelian metaphysics and philosophy of history as his view of the community contains elements of the functional totality of biological organisms and physiological stages of birth, decay, and death. Social action, in turn, can be studied in terms of social institutions and cultural pat­ terns, empirical laws of historical evolution, and individual motives for human action. The study of law and the Volksgeist requires an alternative meth­ odological approach to that of the natural sciences since they reflect an organic view of the communal spirit, which is the source of the values and institutions of society. This legal theory represents a fun­ damental critique of Enlightenment rationality, scientific method and nominalism, and liberal individualism. “It must employ historical concepts in order to bring into relief the concrete connections be­ tween meaningful aspects of these totalities.”67 Jurisprudence, too, requires a historical method which selects from the multiplicity of perceptions the essential and meaningful elements of history in or­ der to comprehend the individual significance and manifestations of the national spirit. However, it also seeks to move beyond immedi­ ate observation to establish heuristic links and empirical generaliza­ tions about the Volk, which are not nomological or natural laws in the abstract or contentless sense used by natural science. The his­ torical study of law would establish abstract representations of the common legal features and general interrelationships between his­ torical events within the intuitable totality of the national commu­ nity. That is, it seeks concrete patterns of particular meaningful phe­ nomena “in their full individuality.” The individual events to be ex­ amined in qualitative detail are the product of intelligible choices from among the infinite manifold of perception. History deals with the representations or ideas which emphasize the significant and in­ telligible aspects of the manifold of empirical reality. This approach investigates historical knowledge of the concrete empirical world

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and not absolute validity based on rationalist reduction and causal deduction. Weber views Roscher as moving between the natural and social sciences, attempting to ground his understanding of social science in the paradigmatic distinctiveness of jurisprudence. Religion and history, metaphysics and science are so intercon­ nected as to make any precise statement about the methodology of historical science vague and imprecise. Weber recognizes that Roscher’s own agnosticism and relativism prevent his fall into a full­ blown Hegelian panlogism. Ultimately, the totality is not graspable by finite human reason nor explainable by human laws. Weber also recognizes that in Roscher’s view of science and economics, the main task is the creation of economic laws that trace societal evolu­ tion. There is an epistemological conflict between the use of ab­ stract, analytical categories and concrete, meaningful ones, as well as between empirical generalizations and religious emanatisms. Weber writes, “The result, of course, is an inconsistency between his [Roscher’s] methodological position and his main idea concern­ ing the laws of historical development.”68 Weber contends that Roscher never faces these methodological difficulties but falls back into an acceptance of the psychological laws of classical economics and eighteenth-century utilitarianism. Human behavior and motiva­ tion are governed by the instincts of self-interest and love of God. After all these contradictions and deviations, he concludes that Roscher’s major failing is that he never grasps the logical relation­ ship between concepts and reality. For Weber, Roscher’s key contri­ bution to the methodological debate is the principle that concrete reality is amendable to economic laws and general categories. There is thus a split between empirical research and economic method, that is, a logical split in the way concepts are formed be­ tween an orientation grounded in the concrete historical and indi­ vidual and a reality grounded in organic, universal, and nomological laws of causality. Roscher weaves his way among history, sci­ ence, and religion as he searches for the appropriate method of histori­ cal economics. The situation is complicated by Roscher’s introduc­ tion of Hegelian emanatism and a strong religious philosophy of history. It is as if he replaces Kant’s thing-in-itself with the notion of an “inaccessible horizon” or the ideas of God—all resonating with elements of Hegelian metaphysics. The abstract natural laws of his­ tory are the ideas of God, which act as immanent forces in history but cannot be known by the finite mind, which instead searches for

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intelligible reasons and motivation behind human action. But Weber rejects the Hegelian view that empirical content can be derived from ideas—that reality can be derived from concepts. For Weber, this epistemological agnosticism only adds to the methodological con­ fusion. The issue gets even murkier when Weber continues his analysis of Roscher’s theory of the laws of historical evolution grounded in his organic and metaphysical theory of the Volk. Because nations are living organisms, there is a process of cultural development which mirrors biological evolution. There is an aging process in national communities in which cultures are born, grow old, and die, and Roscher depicts this physiological transformation in economic terms according to the predominance of nature, labor, or capital in the sphere of production. The succession of economic and cultural stages of the nation permits the articulation of universal laws of historical evolution that are applicable to all societies. Weber says of this ap­ proach that the laws possess nomological necessity and universal­ ity. “This is obviously a peculiarly natural-scientific mode of thought.”69 Weber distinguishes it from natural science in that it is not intended to develop contentless abstractions that subsume indi­ vidual events under universal laws of history. His conclusion again is that Roscher is inconsistent in the articulation and application of his methodological writings. A further problem Weber finds in Roscher is his emphasis on the totality of historical experience, which would include analysis of the effects of noneconomic factors on economic life and his reduction of historical economics to the laws of economic evolution. For We­ ber, this problem rests on the issue of grounding nomological laws. As we have already seen, there is a tension running throughout Roscher’s writings between an emphasis on concrete history and empirical reality, on the one hand, and economic laws of develop­ ment of the species Volk, on the other. Weber contends that Roscher never recognizes the problem and ultimately grounds his economic theory in an explanatory psychology of instincts that represents a return to classical economics. Human beings are moved by two so­ cial instincts—self-interest involving a utilitarian desire for material goods and pleasure, and a love of God, which includes the desire for social justice, equality, freedom, and perfection. These instincts recapitulate the dualism in capitalism between the private and pub­ lic, citizen and bourgeois. According to Weber, Roscher’s method-

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ology of historical economics rests upon the whole of eighteenthcentury classical economics and its utilitarian framework of the ten­ sion between self-interest and the general will. But even this posi­ tion is not held consistently, since Roscher’s views of God, religion, and the organic nation run counter to the Enlightenment view of society. Though economic institutions can be explained through the categories of classical economics, social life, which includes the nature of law and the state as examples of communal life, requires a different set of explanatory concepts. With an organic view of social life, causality is circular since every phenomenon is caused by ev­ ery other phenomenon. There are no clear forms of causality be­ tween distinctive aspects of society. This is what Roscher calls the “inaccessible horizon” of phenomena, which will later become im­ portant in Weber’s own theory of adequate causality. There are clear limits to historical reason and discursive knowledge that result from Roscher’s organismic view of life. “It is not the irrationality of real­ ity which resists subordination under ‘laws,’ but rather the ‘organic’ uniformity of socio-historical complexes.”70 The limits of knowledge rest neither in the irrationality of history nor in the nonexplainability of individual phenomena through gen­ eral concepts. Rather, the problem lies in an epistemology which attempts to relate causally concrete institutions or phenomena and organic universals or organisms that are not simply collections of individuals. This is the problem of the particular and universal on a new level of economic theory. Organic complexes of social life can­ not be causally explained by means of individual phenomena. They are of a different logical and ontological nature. Weber concludes that “Roscher’s historical method is self-contradictory.”71 When ex­ amining economic policy, Roscher admits the possibility of ground­ ing norms for practical action on the objective foundations of eco­ nomic evolution and relies for this on his organic view of social life. When examining history, he returns to his agnosticism and relativ­ ism in order to explain concrete historical moments. In the end, Roscher fails “to grasp the methodological importance of the logi­ cal problem concerning the relationship between a concept and its object.”72 Methodological Dispute Continues with Knies In his essay, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality” (1905-06), Weber turns his critical attention to Knies, who published his major

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methodological work, Political Economy from the Historical Point o f View, in 1853 to a disappointingly quiet reception. The second edition of 1883 was better received since it was published just be­ fore the Methodenstreit exploded with the dispute between Menger and Schmoller. Weber characterizes Knies’s work as difficult and challenging to read because it is frequently “awkward” and “unin­ telligible.” Knies, too, is interested in formulating a clear definition of economics as a science but, like Roscher, is plagued by residues of metaphysics and Hegelian philosophy, an organismic theory of the personality, the Volksgeist as a homogeneous essence and total­ ity, and elements of psychologism and instinct theory. Nomological laws are to be established in history through the study of instinctual forces. History emanates from these psychological forces and un­ derlies their movement. The regularities of history are based on bioanthropological laws of instincts in which concrete events are ex­ plained as institutional emanations. For Knies, the central feature of economics, distilled of its underlying metaphysics, is its causal in­ vestigation of the mental motivation of historical individuals in their relation to external phenomena. History examines human action in the political, cultural, and social context by showing the relationship between the mental life of unique and specific individuals (persons and mass movements) and the motives for their actions. While Roscher stresses the rational intentionality and self-consciousness of human activity, Knies’s emphasis is on the free and irrational side of human action. This is to be the focus of scientific investigation, and this defines the distinctiveness and limits of the logic and method of economics. Knies distinguishes between the unpredictability and freedom of human action and the necessity of nomological laws of nature af­ fecting economics. Economics is incapable of discovering mechanical laws of human economy because of the freedom and unpredictability of the human will in history. There is thus a tension in Knies be­ tween the irrationality of individual will and the causality of natural conditions of scientific laws. The parameters of historical methodol­ ogy are set by a very Kantian critique of practical reason—the per­ sonality, human dignity, and individual autonomy—which results in the inability to mechanically systematize and rationally predict hu­ man action using universal nomological laws. “Such ‘laws’ are in­ trinsically of absolutely no ‘significance’ for the interpretation of action.”73 The difference in psychology between Knies and Kant is

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that for the former, freedom of will is an irrational and incalculable activity of the individual. Weber, at this point in his analysis, is still concerned with the central question of the relationship between sci­ entific ideas and concrete reality but now expresses it in Kantian terms of the historical and acting subject and necessary causality of natural events. The goal of historical science is to study historically significant individuals and their motives for acting within a concrete web of causal conditions. Weber will side with Kant and Roscher against Knies’s psychological irrationalism since he wishes to estab­ lish a causal connection between social action and human intention­ ally. Irrationality has a place in the cultural sciences only in the form of individual pathologies or deviations from ideal types. Weber digs more deeply into Roscher’s claims about the signifi­ cance of the individual personality as the subject matter of history by asking if the proper focus or goal of scientific knowledge should be the mental life and motives of great individuals themselves or the complex conditions and causal features that influence concrete ac­ tions. The underlying logic of these two approaches to the historical method is different in each case. To emphasize the mental life of the individual would require a psychology of immediate experience through which the scientist is able to imaginatively reconstruct the same thoughts, feelings, and ideas of historical individuals and the possible relations between these mental states and motives for his­ torical action. To treat history in terms of explanatory causality re­ quires a different kind of causality: we may search for a particular unique cause in history, or a constellation of external motives and intentions based on empirical generalizations, that is, the unique­ ness of motives or a generic explanation of constant motives of a personality. The nature of the object of inquiry determines the logic and method of scientific knowledge. Knies’s emphasis on the Kantian personal­ ity, free will, human dignity, and the incalculability of human action defines the range of objectivity in the historical method. Unpredictability, imprecision, and irrationality do not lie in human action per se, nor are they the basis for the distinction between hu­ man action and natural processes. In developing Knies’s argument, Weber likens human action to a boulder splitting because of a storm and falling rocks. This occurrence is quite explainable using the available laws of mechanics. Everything can be explained from the angle of the splitting, the direction of the fall of the rock, and the

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general direction of one or more fissures. However, though the infi­ nite splitting would still be compatible with the abstract nomological laws of mechanics, it would be impossible to explain the infinite variety of concrete, scattered fragments. Infinite regress would be pointless and impossible. Thus, nomological laws are ultimately knowledge of statistical relationships, general probabilities, and rela­ tive frequencies. In this sense the splintering of the boulder is the same as the throwing of a pair of dice.74 The same holds for history and human action. The problems of complex causality, infinite regress, infinite multiplicity of phenom­ ena, and the inaccessibility and irrationality of the concrete particu­ lar are reproduced in history because every individual personality, event, and social group also has infinite characteristics and interre­ lationships. The subject matter of physics is no more rational than individual activity. Though the natural and social sciences share these similarities, the science of human conduct requires a different method of study based on a qualitatively different type of causal explana­ tion and irrationality. Knies shows how causal explanation in his­ tory necessitates the interpretation of human conduct by understand­ ing action in terms of causal motives which are reproducible in the inner experience of the scientist. A meaningful interpretation of ac­ tion requires an application of a theory of adequate causality and sufficient motivation which bases understanding on the intentions, beliefs, and values of an individual. These will be used to calculate the character and motives of a particular action. The development of nomological and statistical laws to explain human action is useless because they are incapable of interpretation and understanding. Applying them to the study of history in an attempt to interpret a particular action “would contribute absolutely nothing to the project of ‘understanding’ ‘why’ this reaction ever occurred and, moreover, ‘why’ it invariably occurs in the same way.”75 Access to this infor­ mation is only through the creative and reproductive imagination of the scientist, not the statistical laws of scientific probability. Weber deems it necessary to characterize the nature of interpreta­ tion of action in more detail. To accomplish this he turns to Wundt’s theory of creative synthesis, historical interest, and causal signifi­ cance, Hugo Mlinsterberg’s ideas on the subjectifying sciences, evaluation, historical interest, and interpretive understanding, Simmel’s use of objective understanding and subjective interpreta­ tion, Friedrich Gotti’s philosophy of science, reconstructed mean-

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ing, and immediate experience, Theodor Lipps’s theory of aesthet­ ics, values, and empathy, and Benedetto Croce’s critique of inter­ pretive reason and intuition.76 Borrowing from these epistemologi­ cal and methodological considerations, Weber completes the first work of his Wissenschaftslehre with his theory of historical interpre­ tation. Though these authors’ contributions are useful in honing and sharpening his own thoughts, Weber is concerned that their ideas on method lead to a subjective and intuitive understanding of history, thereby reducing it to an arena of immediate psychological emo­ tions and thoughts. By subjectifying history, the scientist loses the concrete and objective knowledge of actual historical individuals and human action. There is also no methodological certainty or veri­ fiability that the feelings reproduced by the historian reflect the ac­ tual feelings of the historical actors. Weber talks about the emotional response of a traveler to the charming and distinctive architectural contours of an exciting, newly experienced city as logically similar to “unarticulated historical intuitions” based on subjective feelings. “On the whole, their theoretical value for science decreases as their aesthetic charm increases....They can constitute an obstacle to em­ pirical knowledge....In this case, the claim that ‘knowledge’ of this sort is subjective is equivalent to the claim that it is not ‘valid.’ It is not valid simply because it has not been analytically articulated.”77 Weber’s critique of a subjectified science grounded in immediate intuition, relived experience (Nacherleben), or psychological em­ pathy (Einfiihlen) is that subjective feelings replace objective cau­ sality and empirical analysis, emotions replace analytical catego­ ries, empathy replaces understanding, and psychology replaces hermeneutics and science. Though empathetic understanding may provide material for interpretive sociology, the method of Verstehen itself deals neither with the original experience of the subject nor the act of reexperiencing the event by the historian.78 In neither case is there a basis for demonstration or verification. Understanding refers to the transcendental operation of constituting historical and cultural objects which have meaning. Weber concludes that “subjective, emotional ‘interpretation’ in this form does not constitute empirical, historical knowledge of real relations (causal interpretation). Nor does it constitute that which it otherwise could be: interpretation based on values”19 Weber takes a very strong methodological position here based on his reading of Simmel’s distinction between subjec­ tive interpretation and objective understanding of meaning in his

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Problems in the Philosophy o f History (1892)80 and on Gotti’s idea that the objects of immediate experience cannot be the basis for sci­ entific explanation. The appropriate sociological method is not the result of self-evident empathy or unarticulated feelings produced in direct experience but a historical reconstruction of meaning and cau­ sality by the connection of individual motives to social action. Since science involves demonstration and verification of intersubjectively valid ‘objective truth,’ there must be some form of methodological objectification through theoretical reconstruction. A theoretical object of causal analysis must be created by the cultural scientist. Emotional reproduction and interpretation do not play a constituent part in the historical analysis of causal relationships, but they do play a constitutive role in the initial process of evaluation of experience and the formation of historical individuals as ideal types and analytical constructs. Knowledge replaces feeling, analytical concepts replace subjective experience, and science replaces empathetic understanding as the foundation of the cultural sciences. Ideal types are viewed as conceptual schemas that remove the his­ torical researcher from subjective intuitions to the objectively given situation in society. The formation of “nomological laws” in history requires that actual motivation be replaced by ideal-typical purpo­ sive-rational action which can then be compared to the given facts through historical analysis. This will further highlight the actual course of action, as well as the influence of both rational and nonrational causes. All this presupposes the use of an interpretive method based on purposive-rational action that acts as a hypothetical explanatory thesis. Because of his rejection of psychologism and subjectivism, We­ ber focuses on the objects of understanding, the logic of concept formation, and the nature of causality in method. He is interested in forming ideal types of.purposive-rational action. The goal of history is not to rethink the thoughts of historical actors nor to reconfigure the original experience; it is based not on “intuitive self-evidence” but on empirical and observational certainty. The reproduction of possible action in inner experience is not an attempt to recreate in the mind the actual event or relive an emotional experience of his­ tory, but rather it is a formal procedure for analogically determining the ideal types of possible rational action and effects given a set of meaningful causal principles, ideas, and motives. This method rep­ resents an objective and not subjective understanding of history.

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Empathy is a logical tool of interpretive understanding, not an ac­ tual procedure for the historical method. As with Kant, only con­ cepts can give us knowledge and objectivity. Interpretive understanding produces certain kinds of concepts— ideal types—which act as formal hypotheses or heuristic devices. Empathy is important to the extent that we, too, can understand the meaning and significance of the historical valuation of others. In his analysis, Weber is attempting to do two things at once: He is at­ tempting to distinguish the phenomenological certainty and qualita­ tive ambiguity of history from the logical truths of neo-classical eco­ nomics, while at the same time remove the historical method from simple psychological reproduction of intuitions in direct experience. Historical knowledge is subjective, but in the sense of Kantian epis­ temology and not in the sense of the empathetic psychology of Dilthey. The latter has relevance only when the historian is repro­ ducing a cultural phenomenon as a whole, the feelings of a commu­ nity or general character of an epoch or work of art. Weber begins to unfold his own complex theory of interpretation based upon his underlying neo-Kantian epistemology. Interpreta­ tion is not a historical method for immediate psychological repro­ duction of the personal thoughts and intuitive feelings of historical actors. Rather interpretation involves evaluation and inquiry into the values embedded in concrete historical forms and entities. Causality and human motivation are explained not by means of a psychology of subjective feelings but by means of an interpretive understanding of intersubjectively shared meanings and objective cultural values. The historian seeks not to reproduce the actual thinking and subjec­ tive feelings of Sophocles, Goethe, or Calvin, but the thoughts and values embodied in their works and actions that are of historical interest to us. They become historical individuals for us through a process of valuation. “‘Meaningfully’ interpretable human conduct (‘action’) is identifiable by reference to ‘valuations’ and ‘meanings.’ For this reason, our criteria for causal explanation have a unique kind of satisfaction in the ‘historical’ explanation of such an ‘en­ tity.’”81 Following in the footsteps of Rickert, Weber argues that we con­ stitute the historical object within the framework of a philosophy of history that gives direction to and grounds our choices of valuation. To the extent that the former is helpful to the latter, Weber acknowl­ edges that subjective reproduction may have heuristic value. This

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idea will later be dropped from Weber’s methodology. Historical concepts are formed out of a valuation process of the researcher in which value is ascribed and objects are formed. Weber fears becom­ ing lost in the subjective intuition of an empathetic individual, lost in the intuition of values. Alternatively he constructs historical ob­ jects and events out of imputed values and proceeds to examine the causal relationships between historical action and precedent motives and intentions. Any emotional content of subjective perception must be retranslated into ideal types or analytical constructs in order to create a “determinateness of content” in which value choices are made objective and concrete. To clarify his position on the historical method, Weber offers the example of the perception of the color red. The indeterminateness, ambiguity, and subjectivity of the per­ ception of color, whose content cannot be universally communi­ cated or confirmed, cannot be made the logical basis for the study of history. Concepts about history must have a shared communicable meaning. The purpose here is to remove historical method from sub­ jective feelings that are not objectively reproducible in analytical, historical concepts. The defining difference between the historical and natural sci­ ences lies in Weber’s theory of interpretive understanding with its distinctive view of causality, historical interest, and self-evidence. Differences between the two types of science rest not in the notions of causality or general concepts but in the logic and application of causality. As he has written elsewhere, Weber states that historical individuals are not deducible from nomological laws as in the natu­ ral sciences because of their infinite array of properties that become objects of investigation and because of their cultural and causal sig­ nificance. The effects of meaningful human intentions and concrete motives contain unique qualities that result from past historical con­ ditions. The historical method is to be used to understand rationally purposive actions, their underlying motives, and plurality of pos­ sible means. After studying the meaning and values that direct hu­ man action toward specific goals and the cultural significance of historical individuals, the researcher imaginatively reconstructs a range of historically possible means based on his or her general knowledge of conscious deliberation and human action—empirical generalizations. That is, knowing an individual’s intentions and motivation and having the empirical generalizations of psychologi­ cal and social behavior, the investigator is able to project the rational

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action necessary to reach the desired ends. By the logic of purpo­ sive-rational action, only the means yf y1 or y2 can accomplish the desired goal x. This is what Weber intends by the application of nomological knowledge within an objectively given situation. By this technique he hopes to trace the direct relationship between means and ends, motives and actions. In his essay, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” Weber writes, “A historical ‘interpretive’ inquiry into motives is causal explana­ tion in absolutely the same logical sense as the causal interpretation of any concrete natural process.”82 Using the method of empathetic understanding, empirical generalizations, and the plurality of his­ torical possibilities, the researcher constructs a range of hypotheti­ cal rational actions that could lead to the desired goal. “This is a purely ‘technical’ evaluation: i.e., the adequacy of the ‘means’ for the empirically given intended purpose of the actor is confirmed solely by observation.”83 If there is an unintended consequence or a different and unanticipated result than the subjectively intended one, then this deviation must also be explained. The ideal types, causal relationships, and nomological knowledge must be tested against the observations and empirical evidence of historical reality. Beneath his neo-Kantian theory of historical knowledge there is a strong ele­ ment of methodological realism, which unfortunately he has not philosophically justified in the course of his writings on method.84 Distancing himself from his earlier epistemology, moving beyond culture and meaning to history and structure, formalizing social cat­ egories, and rationalizing the logic and method of inquiry, Weber finds himself in serious philosophical difficulties. He has neither the philosophical vocabulary to express his explanatory science nor an apparent awareness of the methodological implications of his theory of rationalization and the structural origins of capitalism. The ten­ sions between epistemology and method are never resolved. Weber maintains that ideal types are created as hypothetical pos­ sibilities of human deliberation and purposive-rational action in or­ der to reach an understanding of the empirically given reality and its correspondence to or deviance from the constructed ideal types. In this way, historical science is able to determine the adequacy of an actual choice of means to accomplish explicitly stated ends, as well as its unintended consequences. By measuring the intentions of and means to the actual consequences, we are able to determine the dif­ ferences between the ideal construct and the actual reality. The ideal

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conceptual schemas help in highlighting the rational and irrational elements in history. Weber is very clear at this point: “We are not concerned with a ‘psychological’ analysis of ‘personality’ under­ taken with the help of some sort of peculiar theoretical device. On the contrary, we are concerned with an analysis of the ‘objectively’ given situation, an analysis that employs our nomological knowl­ edge.”85 This notion of nomological knowledge has been trans­ formed into a methodological tool for understanding historical social action. Ideal types remove the researcher from a method of under­ standing based on personal intuition to a historical method based on the objectively given reality and causal relation between subjective intentions and social action. Weber’s methodology carefully articu­ lates and reflects his own underlying moral and anthropological as­ sumptions about the rationality, dignity, and freedom of the indi­ vidual and his critique of positivism derived from Kant’s critiques of practical and pure reason.86 These issues of ideal types, explanatory understanding, social meaning, adequate causality, and the critique of subjectivism are further developed in Weber’s later writings on the methodological foundations of sociology, especially in “Basic Sociological Terms” in Economy and Society. Knies had been critical of Roscher and the belief that economic laws could be deduced from the psychological and instinctual na­ ture of the individual. Reacting to the centrality of the isolated indi­ vidual of the classical tradition, Knies looked to an analysis of the totality of empirical human actions. This is accomplished by a sci­ entific examination of real causal relationships between historical phenomena which express the essence of a homogeneous instinc­ tual force underlying history and culture. This instinctual force is the homogeneous foundation from which all human action and val­ ues emanate. The blending of issues of the logic and method of historical knowledge with the remnants of a Hegelian metaphysics of culture and philosophy of history makes the articulation of logic and concept formation of a historical method very difficult for We­ ber. But in spite of all these weaknesses, the writings of Roscher and Knies offer Weber a first opportunity to investigate these complex issues. In a later essay of the Wissenschaftslehre, “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” Weber continues to separate philosophy from theory, history from sociology, and unfortunately turns to the highly formalized language of positivism, which reflects neither his actual

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intentions nor his contemporaneous writings on economy and soci­ ety. But the emphasis in this short work is on a continuous rethink­ ing of the nature of “science” in terms of the formation of explana­ tory hypotheses, statistical probabilities, functional uniformities and social regularities, and empirical verification and self-evidence (Evidenz). Though interpretive sociology is still apparently explained in terms of individually meaningful action and subjectively inten­ tional behavior, the categories used to express these ideas have be­ come abstract generalizations, heuristic experiments, analytical typologies, and pure types further removed from the historical world and depleted of much of their concrete content.87 One can explain this transformation only as an attempt to formulate a system of clas­ sification that would correspond more closely to the logic and method of natural science and the Austrian School. Weber shifts emphasis from cultural meaning and norms as the basis for historical under­ standing and causality to the concepts of legal jurisprudence and the objective meaning of political organizations and institutions such as the state, formal associations, and feudalism. Finally, he seems to be more concerned with issues of the conditions and consequences within which meaningful action is oriented. By the time of the prefatory chapter in Economy and Society, “Basic Sociological Terms,” the emphasis is on formal types of social ac­ tion (instrumental rational, value rational, affectual, and traditional), types of legitimate order and authority in organizations and associa­ tions, and general historical phenomena, such as feudalism, patrimonialism, bureaucracy, and charisma. Just at the moment when history and structure are a central focus of his empirical research, Weber’s methodological articulation forges beyond his earlier neoKantian concerns for particularity and uniqueness of culture and history to idealized types and abstract formal knowledge: “We have taken for granted that sociology seeks to formulate type concepts and generalized uniformities of empirical process.”88 Weber is aware that the idealization of typical motives and subjective intentions re­ flects marginal and rare occurrences in reality, since most individual action is affected by nonrational “motivational situations,” such as external structures and processes, and by irrational psychological behavior. This continued separation of sociology from history is a result of the sociologist’s desire for greater scientific precision, clar­ ity, and verification. Weber’s ultimate goal is an understanding of the meaning of social action by a comparison of ideal constructions

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to empirical reality, leading to the clarification of concrete, historical events and social actions. However, the unintended consequence of his methodological position is an unfortunate tendency to under­ mine the goal of sociology and turn it into a highly formalized and sterile investigation. In his rush to science, Weber tends to lose the distinctions between the cultural and natural sciences to the point where understanding is arbitrarily abandoned in the face of the need for causal explanation. Here the search for cultural meaning and individual motivation is lost behind the imperatives of explanatory hypotheses, statistical probabilities, empirical verification, and na­ ive realism.89 Weber was certainly aware of this possibility in his criticisms of the unreal abstractions found in neo-classical economic theory. In the end, however, he never resolves the tensions within a sociology of “explanatory understanding”—tensions between an explanatory and interpretive approach, between the natural and cul­ tural sciences. And much of this may be accounted for by the neoKantian assumptions of his underlying logic and method. It is these very assumptions which prevent his falling into a methodological positivism like that outlined by Parsons in The Structure of Social Action. Fortunately for Weber, his own historical research continues unabated by these methodological inadequacies and weaknesses and forces him out of the limits of his own neo-Kantian theory of knowl­ edge. Integrating Understanding and Explanation David Goddard has argued that the methods of understanding and explanation provide conflicting forms of objectivity. He claims that Weber’s position oscillates between the epistemological objec­ tivity of Kant and the methodological objectivity of logical empiri­ cism, that is, between objectivity as transcendental phenomena and objectivity as historical causality.90 The former is derived from the interpretive method of Verstehen and the latter by means of scien­ tific explanation. Goddard has called our attention to an important problem in Weber’s methodological writings, but he has defined it in its most extreme form. The difficulty Weber faces is that the phe­ nomenal forms of objectivity are created through cultural signifi­ cance, which must then be placed in a framework of historical ex­ planation and causality in order to be considered a science. He winds his way through history and science so subtly that one must pause to ask: Is he doing economic history or historical science? Is

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Weber a historian or sociologist? The central issue seems to be: Can Weber accomplish this integration of philosophical traditions with­ out reducing social science to natural science? He must find a way of developing a social science which is grounded in the neo-Kantian critique of positivism and the German School’s emphasis on the his­ torical uniqueness of events and which also includes elements of the nomological tradition, scientific justification, and objective validity. The two forms of objectivity appear to be at cross-purposes—the objectivity of concept formation and the objectivity of methodologi­ cal validation. To solve the internal tension in Weber’s thought, the sociology of understanding (verstehende Soziologie) with its study of culture and subjectively intended meaning must be transformed into an explanatory science. Weber’s goal is to accomplish this with­ out losing the individuality and uniqueness of particular historical events. (This, too, appears to be a concern for the German School.) Weber stands at the end of the nineteenth-century debates on logic and method in the social sciences and attempts to form an integrated social science by combining their various approaches of understand­ ing and explanation, culture and causality, epistemology and method. Goddard writes, “Weber in the end gives two different accounts of objectivity. The first is an account of the conditions under which the social scientist must necessarily approach his subject matter; the second of how he may have valid empirical knowledge of it.”91 Epis­ temological objectivity is a product of the neo-Kantian theory of value, and methodological objectivity is a result of the standardiza­ tion of method, evidence, and verification. A similar point is made by Trent Schroyer, one of the most outspoken critics of Weber’s at­ tempt to integrate the methods of understanding and explanation. For him, Weber is methodologically ambiguous and unclear. He never successfully combines the methods of Verstehen and Erklärung, that is, understanding subjective action and explaining objective culture. Schroyer contends that the attempted integration of interpretive and explanatory sociology is unsatisfactory and epistemologically doomed to failure. With the separation of objective validity and empirical verification from the procedures of understanding and in­ terpretation, Weber has reduced transcendental phenomenology and hermeneutics to the logic and method of the natural sciences. He has reduced concept and theory formation to empirical-analytic sci­ ence. Culture and history disappear beneath the concepts of the Naturwissenschaften and their cognitive interest in technical ratio-

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nality, value freedom, and “instrumentally controlled observations.” Schroyer writes, “Weber’s reflections become positivistic as soon as they are taken in a scientistic and objectivistic manner—as soon as his methodology is conceived as an empirical-analytic method which does not involve a necessary reflection upon the epistemological presuppositions of the understanding of symbolic meaning.”92 Weber is certainly not unaware of these problems. In the essay “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” he summarizes Miinsterberg’s rejection of the integration of “subjectifying thought” based on the interpretive understanding of immediate experience and “objectifying thought” based on value-free concepts and theo­ retical laws of causality. There is a tension between a science ori­ ented to the historical individual and one oriented to nomological knowledge of abstract laws.93 Weber, however, believes that he has solved the problem and that nomological generalizations, reinter­ preted and transformed by his neo-Kantian method, can play an important part in explaining concrete historical events. In his prefa­ tory first chapter to Economy and Society, Weber reaffirms his own synthesis of understanding and explanation with the definition of sociology as a “science concerning itself with the interpretive un­ derstanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences.”94 He wants to maintain the logic and causality of nomological laws while denying their methodological relation to the natural sciences and philosophy of positivism. The critique of positivism remains constant throughout his career. Thus, he says that the interpretive inquiry into causal motives has the same logical status as the principle of causality found in the natural sci­ ences with the restriction that the objects and significance of events cannot themselves be deduced from nomological laws since they are created by another logic of concept formation.95 For him, the principle of causality becomes the logical foundation for both the social and natural sciences. Weber is aware that the theoretical abstractions and conceptual generalizations of nomological laws of causality have a tendency to suppress any reference to meaning, significance, and contextual specificity when applied to the study of history. “Entities...can never be exhaustively ‘deduced’ from exclusively ‘nom ological’ knowledge....This is because a concrete entity is invariably...an in­ tensively infinite multiplicity of properties.”96 Causality can have relevance for the cultural sciences only when its scope is limited, as

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when it traces the causes of underlying motives for unique events. Explanation involves the relating of causes and effects, that is, relat­ ing subjective motives to objective social action; explanation does not involve a naturalistic reduction of the individual to general law. “Historical interpretation is not concerned with our ability to subor­ dinate ‘facts’ under abstract concepts and formulae as their instances. On the contrary, it is concerned...with ‘understanding’ concrete hu­ man action in terms of its motives.”97 The nagging question remains whether this is an adequate adjustment on the part of Weber in his attempt to limit the epistemological scope while broadening the methodological application of nomological laws. It is in his later writings that these problems become more pro­ nounced. There is increased methodological tension between cul­ tural significance and the level of abstraction of ideal types, under­ standing of events and their causal explanation, meaning and inten­ tions of motives and the empirical generalization of purposive-ratio­ nal action or instrumental rationality, and the techniques of interpre­ tive understanding and explanatory science. In the early essays on Roscher and Knies, these same divisions are evident, but, for We­ ber, the gulf actually widens in the later essays as he attempts to pull them together. The analytic distinctions between various method­ ological problems of concept formation and cultural objectivity, on the one hand, and the logic of inquiry and empirical verification, on the other, also reflect broader societal changes due to rationaliza­ tion. Concerns of objective validity, causal adequacy, statistical laws, and empirical verification force Weber away from his original de­ sign of sociology as a cultural science of the historical individual to a form of “sociological rationalism.” Weber recognizes that there are different forms of verifiable generalizations—psychological ex­ perimentation, comparative sociology, and statistical probability.98 But verification is at best inaccurate and rare. He offers examples of his explanatory understanding, such as a person balancing a ledger, chopping wood, or aiming a gun. Scientific understanding requires that we understand the subjective meaning along with the motives and intentions which cause the action to occur. Subjective interpre­ tation requires hypothetical constructs and empirical generalizations to be scientific. But even the examples he offers of the significance of the battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Platea to the development of Greek and Western civilization return to the method articulated in his earlier essays. They do not reflect the rationalization of method

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found in the later writings. The mantra of subjective meaning and history is still there, but its content has been depleted. The goal of sociology can no longer be the understanding of unique individual events since this has been relegated to history proper." Ideal types of purposive-rational action are forms of hypothetical social action. There is no longer any discussion about the unique­ ness of historical events at this point in the analysis as ideal types are now seen as useful for the measurement of statistically average char­ acteristics of events. “For the purposes of a typological scientific analysis it is convenient to treat all irrational, affectually determined elements of behavior as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational action.”100 In order to explain a stock market panic or political or military campaign, it is useful to begin with the rational course of action within the given circumstances. Deviations from the original course of action help explain the influence of irra­ tional influences on motivation and intention. Weber is aware of the importance of repression and broader structural influences on hu­ man activity but chooses to emphasize the centrality of subjective meaning. Even collective entities such as the state, nation, family, and corporation are to be treated as collections of individual actions and normative ideals.101 The nature of objective meaning as an in­ dependent structure or form of sedimented culture standing over and against the individual is never methodologically developed but certainly plays an important role in Weber’s sociology of religion and structuralism. His use of ideal types as purposive-rational action and the re­ quirements for empirical verification take him from an understand­ ing of unique historical events to an explanation of events based on mathematical probability. “Thus causal explanation depends on be­ ing able to determine that there is a probability, which in the rare case can be numerically stated, but is always in some sense calcu­ lable, that a given observable event (overt or subjective) will be fol­ lowed or accompanied by another event.”102 Though the statistics are used to express idealized regularities and generalized uniformi­ ties, they still must ultimately be connected to meaningful events and thus be empirically verifiable. Weber does not appear to recog­ nize the implications that the historical and culturally specific di­ mensions of sociology have been rationalized and replaced by the methodological imperatives of the natural scientific method. But at some level he is aware of this, since he gives history its own method.

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If ideal types and empirical generalizations are characteristic of so­ ciology, history, in contrast, “is oriented to the causal analysis and explanation of individual actions, structures, and personalities pos­ sessing cultural significance.”103 By the end of his life, Weber has moved quite a distance from his earlier writings and reliance on Rickert. Sociological categories, unlike their historical cousins, pro­ duce average types and statistical probabilities and are “relatively lacking in fullness of concrete content.”104 Weber concludes by say­ ing that ideal types, though they are supposed to deal with subjec­ tive meaning and intention, occur only on rare occasions and are marginal to sociology. The irony of all this is that Weber ends his methodological writings by recapitulating the early division in neoKantian philosophy of science between natural and cultural science and appears to be defending aspects of the former over the latter. Weber is aware of what he calls the “motivational situation” within which intentional actions take place. This would be the social context of repressive structures which undermine the conscious intentions of the actors. But nothing more is stated about this sociologically crucial area of investigation that is the later central focus of Marxian and Freudian analysis. With the development of cybernetics, func­ tionalism, and systems theory in the works of Parsons, Luhmann, and Habermas, these issues slowly replace the individualist metaphysics and methodological individualism of Weber’s liberal Kantianism. It is when Habermas ties the rationalization of science to the rationalization of society that issues of unconscious motiva­ tion and repressed ideas supplement Weber’s sociology of subjec­ tively intended meaning. Functionalism does play an important role in Weber’s social theory, but not in the development of his method­ ology, although some brief mention of it is made in Economy and Society. A case can be made that, unfortunately, his methodological writings never catch up with his actual empirical research in his later historical sociology. Much of the tension one finds in Weber’s meth­ odological writings is a result of his blending of Kantian traditions, which sometimes leads to false categorization and confusion. Werner Cahnman takes a different and more positive approach to these issues and, contrary to Schroyer, sees an overall methodologi­ cal consistency in Weber. The conflict between nineteenth-century historiography and theoretical science is essential to his writings. The goal of sociological theory is not to develop universal or deter­ ministic laws but rather to provide heuristic models of social action;

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the goal is not naturalism or realism but counterfactual, utopian models of causality. These models do not represent descriptions of concrete reality or its essence but are based on the probabilities of objective possibility and adequate causality. Although references to laws, statistics, probability, and empirical generalizations are some­ times mistaken as constructs of naturalistic science, they represent the joining together of Rickert, Kries, and the Historical School.105 In the Methodenstreit, Weber did not deny the importance of eco­ nomic theory but just its specific form as manifested, for example, in Menger’s exact laws or Marx’s scientific materialism. Weber is trying to move between the detail mongering (Kleinmalerei) of the historian and the natural laws of the economist to a knowledge of the causal features of individual events. Weber was a child of the Historical School: “He came to fulfill [it] and not to deny [it].”106 Cahnman argues that although Weber sometimes refers to nomological laws, they are not the same laws as those used in natural science.107 One way to move beyond the problems and controver­ sies in Weber’s methodology is to turn to his empirical research and historical sociology. Structure and History Much has been made in the secondary literature about Weber’s methodological individualism and sociological nominalism, as well as his moral nihilism and relativism. These categories presuppose a social world constructed in terms of an aggregation of individual wills.108 Fritz Ringer, Stephen Kalberg, and Bryan Turner have re­ cently raised issues of the need to expand our understanding of Weber’s method to include not only questions of subjective mean­ ing and intentionality but also an analysis of collective patterns of individual action and the existence of persistent objective, social structures.109 For Ringer, issues of methodological individualism and nominalism have interfered with the recognition that in his com­ parative historical studies Weber does examine social institutions, movements, and social orders that are not simply and narrowly de­ fined as the product of individual actions. Market exchange, artisan guilds, and the modern state do have an existence independent of individual action. “Weber’s line of analysis does allow him to move from methodological individualism to the study of complex social interactions and organizations....In any case, the rational action of the individual, while methodologically significant as a point of de-

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parture, was never more than a limiting case in his overall scheme.”110 The study of subjectively intended meaning is an ideal type fulfilled only in few cases. Most of the time, individuals act without full aware­ ness of their intentions, motives, or meaning within cultures, rela­ tionships, and structures they vaguely understand. Therefore, most consequences of action are unanticipated and unintended. This is clear from Weber’s thesis about the Protestant Reformation, devel­ opment of Western capitalism, and process of rationalization. Kalberg maintains that the methodology that evolves out of Weber’s historical writings does not stress individual action. On the contrary, it is mainly concerned with the “constraints upon and opportunities for action” in the form of empirical uniformities, his­ torical regularities, and crystallized patterns of meaningful action within ideal types of customary behavior, social structures, legiti­ mate institutions, classes, organizations, status groups, etc.111 The distinguishing feature of Weber’s substantive works is the integra­ tion of individual action with social structures. According to Kalberg, Weber refers to issues of legitimation, bureaucracy, cul­ tural values, psychological acceptance and internal coercion, power relationships, class and status groups, rationalization and adapta­ tion, and the material conditions of social life as ways of speaking about the issues of structuralism. Organizations, status groups, and class are not only the social and spatial conditions for individual action, but also the “social carriers” or “sociological loci,” that is, they are the conditions for the cultural and institutional reproduc­ tion of society. They are an “independent driving force” and “en­ dowed with the potential to influence causally an historical case or development.”112 Georg Stauth, in a subtle reading of Weber and Nietzsche, maintains that in modern society the concept of struc­ ture is absorbed into the notion of meaningful social action be­ cause the only meaningful action is, in fact, instrumental action (zweckrationales Handeln). “It is the conviction of Weber that modern society only wins its special status in history because it produces the tentative identity of structure and action.”113 The re­ duction of value rationality to instrumental rationality, substantive rationality to formal rationality, conceals the underlying social struc­ tures which unconsciously influence social action. According to Stauth, Weber views the process of rationalization, utilitarianism, capitalist development, scientific progress, and instrumental action as structures and actions which are excluded from rational reflec-

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tion and subjective intentionality. The methodological consequence of these sociological transformations in Western institutions and con­ sciousness is that deep unconscious social structures and processes— bureaucratization, scientization, and professionalization within the capitalist system—are inappropriately viewed as being the result of conscious activity and individual decision making.114 After reading Weber’s empirical historical works, it becomes clear that his own explicit statements on method do not, in fact, reflect the full complexity of methodology found in these writings. In his intro­ duction to Religionssoziologie (1920), the lectures in General Eco­ nomic History (1919-20), and Economy and Society (1921), the his­ torical and structural origins of rationalization and capitalism frame his understanding of the nature of social action in modem society.115 Weber’s theory of history and the process of rationalization encom­ pass a detailed structural analysis of rational and calculable law, the medieval city-state and entrepreneurial commerce, the rise of the nation state, the cultural transformation of the Reformation and En­ lightenment, restructuring of the organization of production around capital, formation of a new class system, and the prominence of modern science and technology in production. Embedded within these studies is an important structuralist model that Weber never makes methodologically explicit.116 They contain a methodological movement away from a neo-Kantian subject as investigator to an analysis of the historical and structural conditions of modernity. It is a movement away from an examination of culture, history, and sub­ jective meaning—away from a perspective of transcendental con­ sciousness—to transcendental history and a study of the structural conditions for the possibility of capitalism. Still firmly planted within the Kantian tradition, Weber has moved from a sociology of subjective meaning to a sociology of structural conditions. Not only are subjective meaning and individual action essential for a sociology of understanding but so, too, are the tran­ scendental conditions of meaning itself. That is, in Weber’s empiri­ cal and historical works, there is a growing concern for objective complexes of meaning and cultural systems, such as the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment; there is a concern for the struc­ tural conditions of modernity in its economic, political, cultural, and social institutions; and there is a concern for objectified institutions and sedimented values, such as those manifested in a mechanized petrification of modernity. A variety of terms have been used to ex-

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press this historical phenomenon, including objectification, reification, sedimentation, and crystallization of meaning in social institutions, organizations, and structures. The formal rationalization and disen­ chantment of culture, the bureaucratization of state, corporations, and large organizations, the autonomous laws and impersonal mecha­ nism of the market, and the formal rationality of law and legitima­ tion—all structure a mechanistic and calculable universe behind the backs of individuals.117 Weber’s work on the material and cultural conditions inhibiting capitalist development in China and India re­ flects this orientation to a historical structuralism which investigates the institutional factors that inhibit or frustrate the development of modernity. For example, in his study of China, Weber traces these inhibiting factors in the existence of prebends and patrimonial bu­ reaucracies, the power of the sib, temple court and village self-gov­ ernment, substantive law, and the Confucian literati. Wilhelm Hennis remarks, “There is no doubt that Weber attributed the depersonal­ ization of the modem world, following from each moment of ratio­ nalizing objectification to capitalism, to the ‘most fateful power of our modem life.’ Nothing is more misleading than the still common opposition of Weber to Marx.”118 This marks a profound break with Weber’s own explicit statements in his methodological writings. Turner, too, argues that there is an epistemological break between Weber’s methodological and historical writings. He writes, “For Weber, therefore, the nature of capitalist relations does not emerge from the characteristics of thrifty individuals, but from a set of struc­ tures which impose rationality on the behavior of social actors....Weber has a clear conception of the structural constraints which determine individual behavior and of the way in which a sys­ tem of constraints has a ‘logic’ or ‘fate’ which overrides individual intentions.”119 In spite of his own specific statements to the contrary, Weber’s historical and sociological works manifest a keen interest in objective structures, unintended consequences, and the course of history independent of practical reason. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism provides further justification for this belief. Weber’s position is that the Protestant Reformation provided the cultural grounds upon which Catholicism was criticized and rejected; disenchantment furthered; the spirit of capitalism nurtured; and scientific rationalism encouraged, all of which resulted in a decline of religion and the rise of Enlightenment rationality, science, and capitalism. In its wake the world has be-

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come a cold, meaningless universe. Beyond the subjective inten­ tions of Calvinists with their inner-worldly asceticism and their ex­ plicit theological rejection of capitalist hedonism and materialism, these very values were unconsciously encouraged. Culture became a competition among the gods in an iron cage ruled by a merciless historical fate. From the Reformation to the Enlightenment to capi­ talism with its polytheism of gods, the development of a rationalized society lay outside the conscious intentions of its citizens. Turner writes, “Although Weber’s early statements on epistemology do rule out both collectivist concepts and general laws, his substantive work, especially the studies of world religions in the Archiv fiir Sozialwissenschaft after 1915, has a very different character....The whole point of this study of Protestantism is to show that capitalism cannot be explained by reference to social psychology, let alone psychological states of individuals.”120 Though the culture of modem capitalism was created through the subjective action of individuals during the Protestant Reformation, a social system was formed which no longer relied upon metaphysics, asceticism, or Christian values to keep it going. As early as The Prot­ estant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber is aware of the im­ portance of reified social structures on individual behavior.121 “The capitalist economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual...to conform to capitalistic rules of action.”122 The full methodological impact of modern disenchant­ ment, societal rationalization, individual pessimism, and existential resignation in the face of “the fate of Western man” was lost on Weber. The claims that Weber was a methodological positivist is an indirect confirmation of this point.123 Standing before the immen­ sity of rationalization and the reality of the iron cage, social scien­ tists could only measure the empirically given. Cultural traditions were replaced by instrumental rationality and purposive-rational action, which became the basis for explaining social action. The rationalization of method followed the rationalization of society. In an incredible twist of irony, Weber became a victim of the same process he so seriously and single-mindedly studied. The elements of Kantian idealism and practical reason have also disappeared. Certainly the method of Verstehen must play less of a role in the historical and sociological analysis of modernity, which

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now acts in a mechanical fashion independently of individual mean­ ing and intentionality. In fact, it operates in a meaningless world of competing gods—a world outside of the neo-Kantian method. His­ tory is no longer viewed as the striving after some absolute meaning but rather as the unreflective adaptation to an alien environment which is no longer understood or valued. This new method of historical structuralism has much in common with Marx’s own method in Capital. Though Weber never explicitly deals with the methodological implications of these issues, they have taken center stage in his later writings. He becomes less interested in the issues of subjective meaning and more interested in the tran­ scendental and structural conditions within which subjective mean­ ing and objective culture evolve. He remarks that “it is the task of the sociologist to be aware of this motivational situation and to de­ scribe and analyze it, even though it has not actually been concretely part of the conscious intention of the actor.”124 Kant had to be re­ placed before he could turn to the issues of history and structure. To pursue these questions would mean that the last vestiges of his neoKantian theory of value, methodological individualism, and idealist metaphysics of the rational subject and free personality would have to disappear. To salvage them would require their removal from his methodology to his ethics {praxis), with the result that the dualism between value relevance and value freedom, as well as his Nietzschean universe, would have to be rethought.125 Instead, We­ ber suppresses the growing separation between his epistemology and philosophy of social science and fights to the end to keep sub­ jective meaning as the central focus of his methodology. In the last analysis, Weber’s methodological writings are a remark­ able but unfinished achievement. Though he raises many important metatheoretical issues, he never resolves the internal conflicts be­ tween history and science, value relevance and value freedom, un­ derstanding and explanation. He never achieves a reconciliation or integration between a science of interpretive sociology with its method of Verstehen and an explanatory science of theoretical soci­ ology with its method of Erklärung. His combining of the two approaches appears at times to be mechanical and throws into con­ fusion his earlier acceptance of Rickert’s theory of value and his neo-Kantian epistemology. The methodologies of understanding and interpretation, on the one hand, and explanation and causality, on the other, are blended together without consideration of the prob-

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lems of integrating the methods of nature and culture. Elements of both a critique of historical reason and positivist science are inte­ grated without appropriate justification. As Schroyer has written, “He [Weber] never clearly expressed the scientific ideal of sociology as an ‘explanatory-understanding.’”126 Weber has gone beyond the lim­ its of Rickert’s epistemology and has no reliable metatheory for re­ flecting upon his later sociological method. In his early writings, Weber wants to transcend the distinctions between nomothetic and idiographic science, explanatory and inter­ pretive sociology. In order to accomplish this, he differentiates be­ tween the nomological laws of natural science and the form of cau­ sality in the cultural sciences. The goal of the cultural sciences is to understand and explain historically contingent and unique events by providing them with a causal foundation through the use of gen­ eral concepts of historical generalizations, empirical regularities, and universal, concrete patterns. Unfortunately, Weber does not meth­ odologically clarify his use of these terms nor explain how they can be applied to the study of history and social action. Does causality refer to the objective context of cultural meaning, concrete struc­ tures and factors of history, or the socioeconomic conditions? The emphasis in these essays of his Wissenschaftslehre expresses his de­ sire to integrate a method of interpretation and explanation—to ex­ plain human motivation in terms of subjective intentions and objec­ tive causal conditions. But how and why this is to be accomplished is not detailed. Certainly the use of deductive laws is rejected. Historical gener­ alizations appear to refer to the accumulated wisdom of the histori­ cal investigator, who, through comprehensive studies, gathers a gen­ eral understanding of the objective cultural context within which individuals act. Returning to an example already cited, knowing how the Persians had traditionally behaved with conquered territories and subjugated peoples, we are able to make judgments about what would have happened to the autonomy of Greek city-states if the Greeks had lost at the battle of Marathon. (This is a form of knowledge that has more in common with phronesis than techne.) These are histori­ cally descriptive and contingent patterns of action which preserve freedom of intention and are not deduced from positivistic laws of human behavior. Weber refers to history using the term “nomologi­ cal regularities,” which retains the logic of causal generalizations to describe historical events but not the reductionism, naturalism, and

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metaphysics of positivism. These generalizations help explain his­ torically contingent and unique events. In contrast, universal laws and nomological statistics are useless and meaningless to the study of history. They cannot explain “why” actions were undertaken; they cannot provide adequate causes for motivation and intentionality; and they cannot place human action within an objective context of significance and meaning. Weber fails to bring together successfully epistemology and method, explanation and understanding, positivism and hermeneu­ tics, methodological individualism and structuralism.127 The tensions between an interpretive science of subjective meaning, causal ad­ equacy, objective possibility, and ideal types and an explanatory science of statistical probabilities, nomological laws, heuristic hy­ potheses, and empirical verification are never reconciled with each other. Nor does Weber discuss the actual nature of empirical verifi­ cation. Ideal types are used to create abstract generalizations that highlight particular aspects of historical reality. But to what are ideal types compared, if not to the complex, empirical reality that is inac­ cessible without a pre-existing conceptual framework? Does this not reintroduce the problems associated with the Kantian thing-in-itself and epistemological realism? How does the cultural scientist get behind the conceptual framework created by value relevance to see history as it really was; how are ideal types justified and verified; is this not a logical impossibility given Rickert’s theory of value? Rejecting the intuitionalism and subjectivism of Dilthey, the ho­ lism and psychology of Roscher and Knies, and the positivism and naturalism of Wundt, Lamprecht, and Menger; transcending the tra­ ditional dichotomies of natural and cultural science of the early neoKantianism of Windelband and Rickert; and integrating interpretive and explanatory sociology, culture and structure, and history and subjective meaning, Weber creates the foundations for a new critical sociology. But however broad and exciting his initial vision, he never develops an adequate understanding of the relationship among its various parts.128 That is, he is never able to integrate his later meth­ odological writings with his earlier ones. Nor does he develop a critical reflection on the use of his later historical and structuralist sociology in General Economic History and Economy and Society. Simmel, Rickert, Nietzsche, and Schmoller are no longer adequate guides to his analysis of the origins and structures of capitalism. Neither history nor structure receives more than the slightest meth-

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odological consideration in his later writings. The shift in emphasis from a study of Calvinist theory and psychology to the structural prerequisites of capitalism in the medieval city, conjuratio (oathbound Christian fraternity), medieval law, rationalization of work, the modern state, and capitalist organization of production should have been accompanied by metatheoretical reflections on the nature of the social sciences. The change from an emphasis on conscious­ ness, cultural meaning, and the categories of the understanding to a structuralist history of Western society should have precipitated a rethinking of the methods and logic of science. It may have marked a change from an earlier Kantian emphasis on freedom and rational­ ity to a later existential pessimism about the extensive power of the iron cage. Though Weber is certainly aware of the importance of social struc­ tures, historical tendencies, and social forces in explaining historical causality, he formulates a method of historical and cultural science in terms of his strong neo-Kantian idealism and liberal bias—the moral autonomy and intentionality of individual action.129 He is unsuccessful in integrating the Kantian worlds of practical reason and individual freedom with the mechanical and deterministic cau­ sality of nature-like social events. Like Kant, he, too, separates pure and practical reason, the determinism of nature and the freedom of the rational will. The question of unconscious or underlying struc­ tural influences on human action comes into play only when there is a breakdown in understanding between intentions and actions. Only when purposive-rational action becomes incapable of making sense of historical events does Weber turn to the explanatory device of unintended consequences. He provides no methodological founda­ tion for the integration of his theory of rationalization with his phi­ losophy of history and human motivation. Rationality is always un­ derstood as the foundation of human action and not as the founda­ tion of social subsystems, unconscious behavior, or structural im­ peratives. History is separated from structures, meaning from un­ conscious motivation, and action from system needs. Weber was never truly aware that his theory of science, technical knowledge, functional specialization, and formal rationality, as well as his theory of rationalization, bureaucracy, and capitalism made the method­ ological use of interpretive sociology more and more problematic. This is because he never clearly articulated or separated his philo­ sophical and political ideals from the process of rationalization and

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reification. The more developed the Enlightenment and Western ra­ tionality, the less the need for interpretive sociology as the preferred method of sociological inquiry. As society slipped deeper and deeper into the iron cage, Weber resisted the transformation through his methodological writings with their emphasis on intentionality, moral autonomy, and subjective meaning. The sociological paradox is that some of the answers to these questions lie within Weber’s own writings. Weber does connect posi­ tivism and naturalism to the broader historical changes initiated by rationalization and scientific disenchantment. But the connections are usually cultural and not structural. Borrowing heavily from Kant, he does not develop a historical or dialectical critique that relates consciousness and method to structures and forms of domination. That is, he never undertakes an investigation into the connection between social structures and institutional rationalization, on the one hand, and methodological positivism as a form of reified conscious­ ness and alienated reason on the other. The relationships between rationalization and alienation remain undisclosed and silent. Although these criticisms are serious limitations in Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre, they do not diminish the importance of his unfinished project. Rather, these limitations become the crucial starting point of later debates in both American and German philosophy of social science in the twen­ tieth century. More work needs to be undertaken to develop the im­ plications of Weber’s sociology, including the epistemological and methodological foundations of his interpretive science, historical sociology, and structuralism. It will be Habermas, who, in his response to Gadamer’s Truth and Method, attempts to connect the hermeneutical issues of textual un­ derstanding and historical interpretation with a materialist theory of history, critical functionalism, and a critique of distorted conscious­ ness and ideology. Sociology must look beneath the surface phe­ nomena of intentionality and self-conscious meaning in order to uncover the deeper structures of labor, power, and domination in modern industrial society. With the development of liberal society and capitalist industry, with the ideological alienation of modern consciousness, social repression of the unconscious, and structural reification of social relationships, new forms of sociological inquiry are needed. The Weberian dualisms between understanding and ex­ planation, history and science, particular and universal, and subjec­ tive and objective can only be overcome by recognizing the histori-

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cal and structural forms of alienated intentions, repressed understand­ ing, and reified social action. Structures, functions, social systems, and mechanical, lawlike behavior express forms of distorted mean­ ing within a certain type of society. An integration of interpretive and explanatory sociology occurs only when an interpretive sociol­ ogy is joined to Weber’s theory of rationalization, Marx’s theory of commodification and fetishism, Freud’s theory of repression and the unconscious, and Parsons’s theory of structural differentiation and system integration. The methods of both structuralism (historical sociology) and functionalism (systems theory) play important roles in sociology as a result of the development of the reified and repres­ sive institutions within modem capitalist society. The divisions be­ tween explanation and interpretation, structure and history, nomological and idiographic science are overcome within social theory itself, which, in turn, comes to have a direct bearing on issues of methodology and epistemology. The problems associated with Weber’s method are not resolved philosophically but are disentangled in the process of understanding the culture and explaining the struc­ tures of modernity. Notes 1.

2.

3.

Wilhelm Windelband, “History and Natural Science,” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980): 165-85; Georg Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay, ed. and trans. Guy Oakes (New York: The Free Press, 1977); and Henrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences, ed. and trans. Guy Oakes (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For an overview of relevant secondary sources on this issue, see Werturteilsstreit, ed. Hans Albert and Ernst Topitsch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971), especially part 2: “Das Problem der Wertfreiheit der Wissenschaft” and the essay by Ernest N agel, “Der E influss von W ertorientierungen auf die Sozialforschung,” (1961), p. 244. The major methodological essays of the Wissenschaftslehre were published be­ tween 1903 and 1921. They include the following: 1. “Roscher’s ‘Historical Method’” (1903) 2. “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy” (1904) 3. “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality” (1905) 4. “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” continued (1906) 5. “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences: A Critique of Eduard Meyer’s Methodological Views” (1906) 6. “Stammler’s ‘Refutation’ of the Materialist Conception o f History” (1907) 7. “Marginal Utility Theory and the So-Called Fundamental Law of Psycho­ physics” (1908) 8. “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology” (1913) 9. “Opinions about the Value-Judgment Discussion in the Committee of the

Vereinfür Sozialpolitik” ( 1913)

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10. “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics” (1917) 11. “Science as a Vocation” (1919) 12. “Basic Sociological Terms” in Economy and Society (1921). These essays were eventually collected by Marianne Weber in the 1922 work Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. About them Dennis Wrong wrote, “His [Weber’s] methodological writings are probably his greatest achievement” in Max Weber, ed. Dennis Wrong (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 8. Many authors have argued that Weber was a positivist including Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1947), pp. 75 and 81; Friedrich Tenbruck, “Die Genesis der Methodologie Max Webers,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 11 (1959): 573-630; Peter Winch, The Idea o f a Social Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967); Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, vol. 2: Weber (New York: The Free Press, 1968), pp. 590 and 595, and “Natural and Social Science,” in Max Weber, ed. Dennis Wrong (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 90-98; Herbert Marcuse, “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 201-26, and “Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus im Werk Max Webers,” in Kultur und Gesellschaft, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 107-29; Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociologi­ cal Thought, vol. 2: Dürkheim, Pareto, and Weber, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1970), p. 239; W. G. Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1972), pp. 16-17 and 100; and Guenther Roth, introduction to Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. xli. See also the contri­ butions of Talcott Parsons and Jürgen Habermas to the discussion on value freedom and objectivity at the fifteenth German Sociological Association in Heidelberg col­ lected in Max Weberand Sociology Today, ed. Otto Stammer (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971), pp. 78-82 and 59-66. Those who have stressed Weber’s critique of positivism and naturalism include: Alexander von Schelting, Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre: Das logische Problem

der historischen Kulturerkenntnis: Die Grenzen der Soziologie des Wissens (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1934; reprinted by Amo Press, 1975); Alfred Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigl and May Brodbeck (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), pp. 723-43, and The Phenomenology o f the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: North­ western Press, 1967); H. H. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber's Methodology (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972), pp. 101,120, and 137-138; Tho­ mas Burger, Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation: History, Laws, and Ideal Types (Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 1976), pp. 65-68, 138, and 152-53; Rainer Prewo, Max Webers Wissenschaftsprogramm: Versuch einer methodischen Neuerschliessung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979); Toby Huff, Max Weberand the Methodology of the Social Sciences (New Brunswick, NJ: Transac­ tion Publishers, 1984), pp. 8-15; and Guy Oakes, Weber and Rickert: Concept

Formation in the Cultural Sciences: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sci­ ences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 11 and 26. Within this methodologi­ cal discussion Burger and Oakes argue that Weber’s early epistemological connec­ tion with Rickert is crucial for an understanding o f his later methodological writ­ ings, whereas Bruun (pp. 11-13) and Ringer (p. 51) see a fundamental break be­ tween Rickert’s philosophy and Weber’s empirical science. Finally, more recently

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason other authors have argued that the key to Weber’s method lies in his critique of positivism, as well as his integration of neo-Kantianism and scientific causal expla­ nation: Julien Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, trans. Mary Ilford (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 3 9 -4 3 ,7 1 ,9 0 ,1 0 1 , and 148; Robert Holton and Bryan Turner, Max Weber on Economy and Society (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 8; Stephen Kalberg, Max Weber’s Comparative-Historical Sociology (Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 82; Werner Cahnman, Weber and Toennies: Comparative Sociology in Historical Perspective, ed. Joseph Maier, Judith Marcus, and Zoltán Tarr (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), pp. 35-38; Fritz Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and So­ cial Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 6,17-26, and 61. David Rasmussen, “Between Autonomy and Sociality,” Cultural Hermeneutics l,n o. 1 (April 1973): 33-38, and Dieter Henrich, Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1952), pp. 82-83, take more of an anthropological position with the argument that Weber’s critique of positivism rests in his belief in the rational nature of man. See Berger, Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation, p. 106. For a critique of this position, see Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, pp. 76 and 116, and Oakes, Weberand Rickert, p. 94. For a contextual overview of the philosophical and sociological issues surrounding the development of neo-Kantian philosophy of science, see Herman Seidel, Wert und Wirklichkeit in der Philosophie Heinrich Rickert (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1968); Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Com­ munity; 1890-1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); Thomas Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860-1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978); Prewo, Max Webers Wissenschaftsprogramm, pp. 26-59; Herbert Schnädelbach, Philoso­ phy in Germany 1831-1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1984); Gerhard Wagner, Geltung und normativer Zwang: Eine

Untersuchung zu den neukantianischen Grundlagen der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers (Freiburg: Alber, 1987); Klaus-Christian Köhnke, The Rise o f NeoKantianism, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Woodruff Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany 18401920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mogens Blegvad, “‘Value’ in Tum-of-the-Century Philosophy and Sociology,” Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 26 (1991): 51-96; and Klaus Lichtblau, Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Zur Genealogie der KulturSoziologie in Deutschland (Frank­ furt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996). Berger, in Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation, stresses the connection between Rickert and Weber and maintains that

6.

Weber’s methodological writings were consistent and did not change over the years (p. 10). In his work Values, Neo-Kantianism, and the Development of Weberian Methodology (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), Thomas Segady outlines the four basic Kantian assumptions reflected in Weber’s method: use of a transcendental method (as opposed to empirical or psychological method); importance of concept for experiencing and understanding the world (as opposed to intuition, impression, or essence); idealist epistemology that reality is unknowable; and objectivity of social science rests on a theory of value and subjectivity (pp. 42-43). Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodol­ ogy of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), p. 72, and “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1985), pp. 170-71.

Max Weber and the Kantians 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

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For an analysis of the differences between Rickert and Weber, see Andrew Arato, “The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectivity,” Telos (Fall 1974): 120-28 and 133-41; Milowit Kuninski, “The Methodological Status of Cultural Sciences According to Heinrich Rickert and Max Weber,” Reports of Philosophy 3 (1979): 80-81; Guy Oakes, Weberand Rickert,; and Peter Ulrich Merz, Max Weberand Heinrich Rickert (Würzburg: Koenighausen, 1990). Oakes, Weber and Rickert, p. 54. In order to get around this difficulty, Rickert and Weber argue that by means of a principle of selection, constitution of objectivity, and value relevance, a unique historical in-dividual is formed that becomes the basis for study based on the principle of abstraction from the infinite manifold. In-dividuals are formed by values. According to Rickert, the objectivity of method is determined by the objectivity of values, but for Weber this is impossible due to his moral polytheism. Oakes draws the conclusion that there is an “underdetermination” of interpretations, since there are multiple valid and mutually exclusive interpretations of the historical facts (p. 94). This means, for Rickert, that the objectivity of cultural science rests on the objectivity of values, which lies in the community (pp. 94-110). For Oakes, Weber never solved this problem of objective validity, except to separate the problem of objectivity (concept formation) from the problem of explanation and causality (ideal types)— splitting the issues of epistemology and methodology. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 72, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 170. Guy Oakes, “Introductory Essay,” in Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, trans. Guy Oakes (New York: The Free Press, 1975), out­ lines Weber’s early critique of positivism in his essays on Roscher and Knies: (1) the cultural sciences cannot be grounded in the hypothetical-deductive method and nomological laws of the natural sciences; (2) the subject matter and methodology of the cultural sciences are different from the natural sciences; (3) the cultural sciences are geared to the description, understanding, and interpretation of the historically specific; and (4) cultural and historical phenomena cannot be described neutrally but require values and interests to become objective (p. 25). See also Susan Hekman, “Max Weber and Post-Positivist Social Theory,” in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 267-86. Max Weber, “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences: A Critique of Eduard Meyer’s Methodological Views,” in The Methodology of the Social Sci­ ences, trans. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), p. 158, and “Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1985), p. 260. Weber contends that the episte­ mological and logical difficulties of distinguishing between Kant’s notion of expe­ rience and knowledge is similar to Rickert’s distinction between primary historical objects and secondary historical objects and Meyer’s distinction between historical objects and effective causality. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 82, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 182. Ibid., p. 76, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 175. David Goddard in “Max Weber and the Objectivity of Social Science,” History and Theory 12, no. 1 (1973): 9, correctly draws our attention to the confusion surrounding the reference to meaning and significance in Weber’s interpretive sociology. Does meaning refer to the actor’s intended meaning or to the observer’s imputed meaning? Weber uses both approaches and never settles on either nor does he integrate them adequately. For an alternative perspective on this issue, see Guy Oakes, “The Verstehen Thesis

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason and the Foundations of Max Weber’s Methodology,” History and Theory, 16, no. 1 (1977): 21. Oakes says that the “Verstehen thesis” runs throughout the early meth­ odological writings but is most prominent in the critique o f Stammler essay. He contends that it is the meaning intended by the individual actor which defines the cultural significance of historical events. Meaning “represents the native’s under­ standing of his own social life” (p. 22) and “should mirror or reproduce the native’s own account.” With this interpretation it could be argued that Oakes has introduced the ocular metaphor of empiricism back into the neo-Kantian philosophy of social science. The issue is whether it is human conduct which is meaningful or our conceptual appropriation of it— the relationship between subjective meaning and cultural meaning. Oakes expands on this issue in WeberandRickert, pp. 28-32 and 80-81. In this work he contends that subjective meaning, personal experience, and phenomenological analysis cannot provide the foundation for the cultural sciences. This is provided by the ideal typical categories of the historian based on the choices of value relevance in the creation of objective or cultural meaning. Although “cul­ tural meaning is not reducible to subjective meaning” (p. 30), Oakes continues that “subjective meaning is a necessary condition for cultural meaning” (p. 90). There is an important difference between the intensive infinity and complexity of particular individual’s religious experiences during the medieval period and the cultural con­ cept “medieval Christianity.” But this difference between subjective meaning and cultural meaning, the actor’s beliefs, motives, and intentions and the ideal types of the investigator is never really clarified. Value relevance is Weber’s answer to the problems of constitution and concept formation in the cultural sciences. See also Oakes’ discussion of the Verstehen thesis in his introductory essay in Critique of Stammler, pp. 22-38. These conflicts have similar implications as Goddard’s claim that there are two theories of objectivity in Weber. Kuninski, “The Methodological Status of Cultural Sciences,” places the emphasis on the application of Weber’s method to interpret the meaning of values that underlies human action (pp. 83-84). This reminds one of the work of Karl Popper who in his critique of empiricism removed objectivity from experience and placed it in the critical method. Some authors have drawn the connection between Weber and post-analytic philosophy of science. See Huff, Max Weber and the Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 126, and Oakes, Weberand Rickert, p. 37. This issue is also raised in Weber’s work, Max Weber on Universities: The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany, trans. and ed. Edward Shils (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 14-18. Here the context is whether Michels should be refused his habilitation because he was a socialist. Again, Weber defends the political outcast. Howard Tuttle, “The Philosophical Genesis of Ideal Types,” Southwest Philosophi­ cal Studies 5 (April 1980): 18-23. Wilhelm Hennis mentions that the technique of using ideal types comes from John Stuart M ill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848). See Wilhelm Hennis, ‘“A Science of Man’: Max Weber and the Political Economy of the German Historical School,” in Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruc­ tion, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 121, and “Eine ‘Wissenschaft vom Menschen’: Max Weber und die deutsche Nationalökonomie der Historischen Schule,” in Max Webers Fragestellung: Studien zur Biographie des Werks (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1987), p. 136. Weber learned this perspective directly at the hands of Knies in 1882-83 whose successor he became in Heidelberg in 1896. Hennis states that it is from Knies that he gets the idea that interpretive sociology examines social action. Hennis is surprised at the lack of analysis o f Knies and the latter’s contribution to Weber in his early method-

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18.

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20. 21.

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ological essays. Hennis writes, “Apart from the sociology of music, I can detect no ‘sociological’ theme in Weber for which one of the older school, in particular Knies, had not laid the basis or at least provided an impulse” (p. 142, and Max Webers Fragestellung, p. 162). Manfred Schön wrote an essay, “Gustav Schmoller and Max Weber,” in Max Weberand his Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987). In it, he argues that another source of Weber’s ideal types comes from Mengen Most of the secondary literature securely places Weber in the Historical School but Schön argues that it is Menger’s theory of marginal utility, which is the crucial influence on Weber, especially his distinction between Gesetzeswissenschaft (science of laws) and Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (sci­ ence of concrete reality), the development of his method of ideal types, his disagree­ ments with Schmoller and the Historical School over the relation between science and ethics, his distinction between value relevance and value freedom, and his support of Böhm-Bawerk at the University of Heidelberg for an honorary degree (pp. 59-71). Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 101, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 202. See Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology, pp. 201-39, Berger, Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation, pp. 154-79, and Kalberg, Max Weber’s Comparative-Historical Soci­ ology , pp. 84-91. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 92, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 192. In his essay, “The Logic of the Cultural Sciences” (p. 160, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 262), We­ ber argues that historical interpretation is a philological interpretation and exegesis because both seek to understand the meaning of linguistic and cultural expressions in a historical or literary text. This is an interesting parallel to Freud’s interpretive science of psychoanalysis which views the psyche and unconscious as a distorted and repressed literary text which requires a depth hermeneutics to plumb. On the issue of ideal types, see Freund, The Sociology o f Max Weber, pp. 59-70; Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology, pp. 201-39; and Berger, Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation, pp. 154-79. Though never clearly stated in his methodological writings, Weber does make the distinction within his theory of value between the creation of historical individuals based on interests and values and the content of historical objects and their relation to the cultural values and meaning of the time. That is, there is in Weber a distinction between the significance of an event “for us” and the significance of an event “for them” (Weber, “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences,” pp. 139,14344, and 160, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 244-45, 249, and 262-63). This appears to be based on the analytic distinction between logic and method of concept formation, on the one hand, and the actual historical analysis, on the other. Weber’s own emphasis is on the former question. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 78, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 177. Ibid., p. 78, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 178. The method of causal explanation is based on the technical procedures of objective possibility and adequate causality, a method derived from Johannes von Kries and Gustav Radbruch in their works Über den Begriff der objektiven Möglichkeit und einige Anwendungen desselben (Leipzig: Fues, 1888) and Die Lehre von der adäquaten Verursachung (Berlin: Guttentag, 1902), respectively. See Gerhard Wagner and Heinz Zipprian, “The Problem of Reference in Max Weber’s Theory of Causal Explanation,” Human Studies 9 (1986): 23, and Steven Turner and R. Factor, “Ob-

196

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23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason jective Possibility and Adequate Causation in Weber’s Methodological Writings,” Sociological Review 29 (1981): 5-28. Wagner and Zipprian declare that the two distinct methodologies o f Weber do no mix well: There is the epistemology of Rickert with its emphasis on the infinite meaningless world, cultural phenomena, and meaning and significance and the explanatory method applying the theory of objective possibility and adequate causality of Kries and Radbruch. Referring to the authors of the secondary literature on Weber, they write, ‘They neglect the question of whether the theory of objective possibility is consistent with Rickert’s theory of concept formation” (p. 24). In fact, the theory of method and explanation becomes independent of the theory of knowledge and concept formation. Can transcendental subjectivity be integrated with scientific explanation? Is Kantian epistemology lost in the method of naturalism and positivism? The dilemma here revolves around the question of whether a causal explanation of individual events is possible. There is a tension between ideal types and historically unique events and transcendental logic and counterfactual logic. Wagner and Zipprian notice that neither Kries nor Radbruch use a naturalistic method or positivistic epistemology. For the latter, objectivity is constituted by the cognitive subject through relevant values. See Freund, The Soci­ ology of Max Weber, pp. 71-79. There is a clear anthropological and moral dimension to this aspect of Weber’s historical methodology. Historical entities are determined through choice, cultural significance, and free will— that is, by the self-determining and self-defining quali­ ties of the historian. Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination: The Origins and Development of Critical Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1973), pp. 122-27. Weber reports in “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences” (p. 168, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 270), that this idea is used by both von Kries and John Stuart Mill. See Kries, “Über den Begriff der objektiven Möglichkeit,” Vierteljahrsschriftfür wissenschaftliche Philosophie 12 (1888). Wagner and Zipprian, “The Problem of Reference in Max Weber’s Theory of Causal Explanation,” pp. 23-24, and Turner and Factor, “Objective Possibility and Ad­ equate Causation in Weber’s Methodological Writings,” pp. 6-11. Weber, “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences,” p. 170, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 272-73. Ibid., pp. 178 and 188, resp ectiv ely , and G esam m elte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 280 and 290. The possibility of a rational reconstruction of historical events in terms of individual action rests with the methodological techniques of ideal types, objective possibility, and adequate causality. See Henrich, Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehre Max We­ bers', Iring Fetscher, “Zum Begriff der ‘Objektiven Möglichkeit’ bei Max Weber and Georg Lukács,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 27 (1973): 504; and Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, pp. 73-76, 106 and 119. The objective validity of this method is determined by the general rules of experience and empiri­ cal validation. Wagner and Zipprian in their essay “The Problem of Reference in Max Weber’s Theory of Causal Explanation,” argue that Rickert’s epistemology does not provide Weber with a model for causal explanation. However, in spite of this, they maintain that Weber’s theory of objective possibility and adequate causal­ ity, which is derived from the writings of Kries and Radbruch, is anti-naturalistic and anti-positivistic (pp. 27-28). Arato, “The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectivity,” p. 135. For an examination of the transmission of Nietzsche’s thought to Weber through the works of Alois Riehl, Friedrich Nietzsche: Der Künstler und der Denker (1897), Ferdinand Tönnies, Das Nietzsche-Kultus: Eine Kritik (1897), and Georg Simmel,

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Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (1907), see George E. McCarthy, Romancing Antiq­ uity: German Critique of the Enlightenment from Weber to Habermas (Lanham, 31.

32.

33.

34.

MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), pp. 60-71. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 81, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 180. Gadamer, too, in the development of his critical hermeneutics, will return to jurisprudence in seeking help to unravel the relationship, not of cause and effect as Weber does, but universal legal principles and concrete application, universal (culture and tradition) and particular textual meaning. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956), p. 102, and Die Geburt der Tragödie, oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1972), p. 105. John Atwell, “Nietzsche’s Perspectivism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 19 (Sum­ mer 1981): 157-70; Wilhelm Hennis, “The Traces of Nietzsche in the Work of Max Weber,” in Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp. 146-62, and “Die Spuren Nietzsches im Werk Max Webers,” Nietzsche Studien 16 (1987): 382-404 and in Max Webers Fragestellung: Studien zur Biographie des Werks (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1987), pp. 167-91; and for an extensive overview of the literature on Nietzsche and Weber, see McCarthy, Romancing Antiquity, n. 53, pp. 304-05. Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology, stresses the importance of J. S. M ill’s episte­ mological agnosticism and moral polytheism as the basis for Weber’s own value nihilism (p. 134). Ringer also argues that the dualism between science and ethics was maintained in order to protect university students from positivism and con­ formism (p. 141). Krüger in “Max Weber and the Younger Generation in the Verein für Sozialpolitik,” states that one reason for Weber’s concern was his fear that the power of positivism and science would be used against ethics and politics to impose itself on them (p. 83). Weber’s fear was not the pollution of science by politics but rather the reverse. In “Science as a Vocation,” Weber states his concern that science will be used for the “pleading for practical and interested stands” (p. 147). Wolfgang Schluchter, Unversöhnte Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996), provides an historical context for Weber’s essay, “Science as a Vocation,” in the history of the Free Student Movement in Germany and in the varied reaction to the essay by Weber’s contemporaries, including Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich von Kahler, Arthur Salz, Ernst Troeltsch, and Max Scheler (pp. 37-70). Schluchter’s emphasis on this essay in his book provides more information about Weber’s ideas about his ethical polytheism and theory o f value, his spirituality, humanistic existentialism, Personlichkeitsbegriff, and his views on Lebensführung. Another essay which ex­ amines Weber’s concern for Hochschulpolitik is Wilhelm Hennis’s “The Pitiless ‘Sobriety of Judgement’: Max Weber between Carl Menger and Gustav von Schmoller— the Academic Politics o f Value Freedom,” History of the Human Sci­ ences 4, no. 1 (1991): 39-48, and “Die volle Nüchternheit des Urteils: Max Weber zwischen Carl Menger und Gustav von Schmoller: Zum hochschulpolitischen Hintergrund des Wertfreiheitspostulats,” in Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre: Inter­ pretation und Kritik, ed. Gerhard Wagner and Heinz Zipprian (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), pp. 124-38. Stephen Turner and Regis Factor, Max Weberand the Dispute over Reason and Value: A Study in Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), argue Weber’s separation of fact and value is a technical and political ploy to ensure the voicing of his own liberal and militantly nationalistic political

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason agenda; that is, Weber’s prohibition on valuation is really a limiting of other’s value judgments in order to favor Weber’s perspective in the general debates in the Verein fur Sozialpolitik (pp. 57-64). “The doctrine of value-freedom and the theory of values thus functioned for Weber both as a political and a critical tool.” (p. 59). They interpret Weber as calling for a new liberal university, while rejecting the neoclassi­ cal view of Bildung, moral education, and character development. The strict separa­ tion of fact and value and the exclusion of all values from scientific inquiry are demanded in specialized and technical disciplines. Note that this approach to Weber’s notion of science excludes any reference to the role of subjectivity and values in the formation of concepts and objectivity. Weber’s discourse on pedagogy is too easily blended into his discussion on methodology. To support their argument they refer to Wolfgang Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Soci­ ology of Max Weber (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1974), p. 29. Wilhelm Hennis, “Max Weber’s Central Question,” in Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988) argues in the opposite direction that the central question which holds Weber’s disparate works together is his ethical concern for humanity, its cultural values, and its spiritual life, that is, the question of Menschentum. It is not an analysis of the rationalization of history that interests Weber but the study of economics as a humanistic science of man (pp. 44-46, and “Max Webers Fragestellung,” in Max Webers Fragestellung, pp. 32-35). This explains, for Hennis, Weber’s central claims for interpretive soci­ ology as a cultural science interested in meaning, values, and practical ethics within a historical process of formal rationalization and mechanized petrification. Hennis sees Weber as a neo-idealist in the tradition of Hegel to Scheler asking questions about the place and fate of man in the world. Hennis connects the idea of Menschentum with that of Werturteilsfreiheit (freedom of evaluative judgments). The idea of value freedom has been misconstrued in that Weber was attempting to protect ethics from Enlightenment science. That is, his goal was to protect “intellectual freedom in an era in which ( ‘bourgeois’) science had laid its prejudice like mildew upon imagina­ tion— especially in the belief in a ‘progress’ that it alone could orchestrate.... Weber’s struggle for freedom from prejudice of ‘scientific’ tutelage...[is] a struggle that places him as a successor to Marx’s struggle against ‘bourgeois science’ and Nietzsche’s struggle for ‘free spirits’” (p. 52, and Max Webers Fragestellung, p. 46). In the end sociology will provide the empirical research into this historical character of modem social institutions for the purpose of unearthing the qualitative question: “What sort of people are produced by modem large-scale industry, by virtue of its inherent characteristics, and whatfate does it prepare for them vocation­ ally and also extra-vocationally.” This quote is from a 1908 work by Max Weber entitled “Methodological Introduction for the Survey of the Society for Social Policy concerning Selection and Adaptation (Choice and Course of Occupation) for the Workers of Major Industrial Enterprises,” in Max Weber: The Interpretation of Social Reality, ed. J. E. T. Eldridge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p. 135. Hennis interprets Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre in light of its Aristotelian influ­ ence. The goal of maintaining the classical view of economics and politics as a moral science permeates Weber’s methodological writings. Hennis concludes his essay by raising the question whether empirical research is adequate in and of itself. Refer­ ring to the 1907 essay, “The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality,” Hennis contends that Weber’s empirical research always had a ethical goal. His central cognitive interest was in asking questions about the nature of the type of person produced by certain types of historical arrangements of social relationships and institutions. And these questions science could not ask.

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The idea that Weber was protecting ethics from science is also maintained by Georg Stauth in his essay “Kulturkritik und affirmative Kultursoziologie: Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber und die Wissenschaft von der menschlichen Kultur,” in Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre: Interpretation und Kritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), p. 176. Just as Kant was protecting ethics and faith from science with his Critique of Pure Reason, so, too, was Weber shielding polytheism from positiv­ ism. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 52, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 149. A. J. Skilien, “The Ethical Neutrality of Science and the Method of Abstraction: The Case of Political Economy,” The Philosophical Forum 11, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 228, places this separation o f ethics and science in the context of World War I and government censorship; and Wilhelm Hennis places it in German academic policies (see Hennis, “The Pitiless ‘Sobriety o f Judgment,’” p. 34, and Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 117-18; and Ricardo Crespo, “Max Weber and Ludwig von Mises,” in Methodology of the Social Sciences, Ethics, and Economics in the Newer Historical School: From Max Weber and Rickert to Sombart and Rothacker, ed. Peter Koslowski (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1977), p. 37; Guy Oakes, “Value Theory and the Foundations of the Cultural Sciences: Remarks on Rickert,” in Methodology of the Social Sciences, Ethics, and Economics in the Newer Historical School, p. 60. Oakes stresses that the transcendental consciousness and critical subjectivity of neo-Kantian philosophy represented a rejection of positivism, correspondence or representational theory o f knowledge, absolute truths, philosophical realism, and a separation between subjectivity and objectivity (p. 64). In their work Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value, Turner and Factor take the position that Weber was defending a subtle integration of science and ethics (pp. 181-83). See Kenneth Boulding, “Economics as a Moral Science,” American Economic Review 54 (1969), and Gunnar Myrdal, Objectivity in Social Research (New York: Pan­ theon Books, 1969). Finally, it should be noted that the Vereinfür Sozialpolitik was founded in 1872 by members o f the Historical School as a vehicle for an ethical political economy. Its earliest members included Roscher, Hildebrand, Schmoller, and Weber. Samuel Bostaph, Epistemological Foundations of Methodological Con­ flict in Economics: The Case of the Nineteenth-Century Methodenstreit, doctoral dissertation in economics, Southern Illinois University (July 1976), p. 12, and Dieter Krüger, “Max Weber and the Younger Generation in the Verein für Sozialpolitik,” in Max Weber and his Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), pp. 71-87. Oakes, Weberand Rickert, pp. 24-26. Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber, p. 8. Mommsen writes, “contrary to customary opinion, Weber in no way thought it inappropriate for sci­ ence to find its inspiration in passionate involvement in political events and vice versa. What he could not tolerate was the uncritical admixture of both spheres, especially in the form of using the lecture to propagate political value-judgments.... Yet in no way did he thereby want to support a purely positivistically understood conception of science as 'value-free,’ that is, far removed from politics or values” (p. 8). Weber’s goal was to separate ethics and science during and after research, since science could never objectively validate or verify any moral or political value (nihil­ ism) or practical course of action (social policy). On this point, see also Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology, who argues that valua­ tion has an important role to play in scholarship, since it opens up issues and questions for scientific research that may not have been previously raised (pp. 111 and 120). He is also aware of the risks of valuation that may influence the content

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40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason analysis of the scientific inquiry. It is at this point that Weber’s distinction between value relevance and value freedom becomes important. American secondary inter­ pretations have tended to confuse these relationships in Weber and have reduced them to historicism or positivism, interpretation or explanation. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber's Methodology, p. 123. The objectivity of science rests on the prior objectivity of values and their subjective selection (Nietzsche) and not on the correspondence of scientific objectivity to reality (Hume) (p. 132). The demand for value freedom, according to Bruun, is the result of a desire to maintain the subjectivity of values as opposed to Rickert’s claims to the general validity of values. Value freedom was intended as a critique of value universalism. The basis for value freedom thus lies in defending ethical nihilism and not in defending positivist epistemology (p. 133). Bruun is correct is arguing that the issue then becomes a defense of the objectivity of social science once Rickert’s theory of objective value is rejected. Bruun’s analysis of the solution is inadequate as he claims Weber’s solution is to abstract from all valuation and get back to immediate reality. However, he does recognize that the answer to the dilemma lies in Weber’s theory of historical phenomena, causality, and ideal types. This position represents a denial o f neo-Kantian epistemology and a contradictory return to the thing-in-itself. Objectivity, as objective validity, now resides in history, causality, and the subject matter and not in a theory o f value (Rickert). Rather, Weber will attempt to show that science is not validated on the basis of community values or a philosophy of history as in Rickert’s metatheory, but by means o f empirical valida­ tion through ideal types, the method of objective possibility, and comparative his­ torical analysis. Questions of objective validity are no longer issues of value but empirical reality. There is a continuous tension in Weber’s writings between subjec­ tive concept formation and objective empirical validity. Finally, Bruun contends that neither Roscher or Knies are able to provide any help in solving the problem of objectivity in the social sciences (p. 95). In fact, when discussing ideal types, he does not mention the methodological dispute in economics but returns instead to Rickert. Bruun concludes that Weber’s primary purpose in all this was a critique of classical positivism and the recognition of the unity of all forms of empirical and scientific inquiry (p. 137). Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 147, and “W issenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1985), p. 603. Ibid., p. 148, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 604. Ibid., p. 143, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 598. For an introductory overview to Weber’s theory of rationalization, see Rogers Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 1-48. Weber, “S cien ce as a V ocation,” p. 150, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 607. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1969), p. 129, and Also sprach Zarathustra, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 6, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968), p. 13. Ibid., p. 130, and Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 6, vol. 1, p. 14. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 182, and Die Protestantische Ethik

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und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1947), p. 204. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 86, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 186. Weber, “Critical Studies in the Logic o f the Cultural Sciences,” pp. 144-45, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 247. Berger in Max Weber ’s Theory of Concept Formation outlines the basic differences between the two schools of economic thought over questions of concept formation, psychology, methodology, and epistemology: (1) the nature of economic concepts and theories, and whether they are universally or only historically valid; (2) the nature of psychological assumptions underlying economics and whether there should be a stress on individual self-interest and egoism; (3) the debate over method and the historical use of the inductive method and theoretical use of the deductive method; and (4) the ontology of historical and theoretical concepts— whether concepts re­ flect individual, empirical reality or are only abstract types and universal laws (pp. 143-46). Berger views Weber as integrating the two positions with his emphasis on general concepts and theory and historically specific phenomena. Both require the other (pp. 150-51). Weber’s theory o f ideal types offers a solution to the Methodenstreit: “It was this epistemological foundation, different from both Menger’s and Schmoller’s, which enabled him to find a way out of the dead-end street of the Methodenstreit” (p. 152). By rejecting the naturalism and positivism of the Austrian School but accepting the necessity to use general categories and nomological laws, economics is transformed into a study of the particularity of cultural phenomena. Carl Menger, Die Irrthümer des Historismus in der Deutschen Nationalökonomie (Vienna: Alfred Holder, 1884), Principles of Economics, trans. and ed. James Dingwall and Bert Hoselitz (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), and Problems of Economics and Sociology, trans. Francis Nock, ed. L. Schneider (Urbana: Univer­ sity of Illinois Press, 1963). Wilhelm Roscher, Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols., trans. John Lalor (Chi­ cago: Callaghan & Co., 1882). Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), contends that the older Historical School did not, in fact, represent a coherent school of thought. Instead there were different philosophical and conflicting perspectives on history and economics (p. 808). It was only with Gustav von Schmoller that a coherent school of thought arose and with Schmollers Jahrbuch there was a platform for the advancement of his school. Schumpeter describes the school with the following characteristics: “high level of historiography; widespread respect for the historical fact; low level of theoretical economics; lack of respect for its values; supreme importance attributed to the state; the small importance attributed to everything else” (p. 812). For further reading of the historical context of this debate, see Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, ‘The Historical vs. the Deductive Method in Political Economy,” trans. Henrietta Leonard, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (October 1890); Werner Hasbach, “Zur Geschichte des Methodenstreites in der politischen Oekonomiz f Schmollers Jahrbuch 19 (1895): 751-808; Thorstein Veblen, “Gustav Schmoller’s Economics,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 1901); Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1942); Friedrich von Hayek, The Counter-revolution of Science (London: CollierMacmillan, Free Press of Glencoe, 1955); Albion Small, Origins of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924); Josef Dobretsberger, “Zur Methodenlehre C. Mengers und der oesterreichischen Schule,” Zeitschrift für Nationaloekonomie (1948-49); Lewis Haney, History of Economic Thought (New

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason York: Macmillan, 1949); Gerhard Ritzel, Schmoller versus Menger: Eine Analyse des Methodenstreits im Hinblick auf den Historismus in der Nationaloekonomie (Offenbach: Bollwerk Verlag, 1951); Emil Kauder, “Intellectual and Political Roots of the Older Austrian School,” Zeitschriftfür Nationaloekonomie 17 (1957-58), pp. 411-25; Ludwig von Mises, The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Eco­ nomics (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969); Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of Social Sciences, pp. 12,24,69, and 79; R. D. Collison Black et al., The Marginal Revolution in Economics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973); John Hicks and W. Weber, eds., Carl Menger and the Austrian School of Economics (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Bostaph, Episte­ mological Foundations of Methodological Conflict in Economics (1976); Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 315-40; Margarete Boos, Die Wissenschaftstheorie Carl Mengers (Wien: Böhlau, 1986); Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. Max Weber and his Contemporaries, (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987); Karl Milford, Zu

Lösungsversuchen des Induktionsproblems und des Abgrenzungsproblems bei Carl Menger (Wien: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988); Keith Tribe, Governing Economy: The Reformation of German Economic Dis­ course, 1750-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Strategies of Economic Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Max Alter, Carl Menger and the Origins of Austrian Economics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); B. J. Caldwell, Carl Menger and his Legacy in Economics, annual supplement to volume 22, History of Political Economy (Durham, NC.: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 1990); Hennis, “The Pitiless ‘Sobriety of Judgement’” (1991); Kiichiro Yagi, “Carl Menger’s Grundsätze in the Making,” History of Political Economy 25, no. 4 (Winter 1993) and “Carl Menger and the Historicism in Economics,” in

Methodology of the Social Sciences, Ethics, and Economics in the Newer Historical School: From Max Weberand Rickert to Sombart and Rothacker, ed. Peter Koslowski (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1997), pp. 231-58; Gerrit Meijer, ed., New Perspectives on Austrian Economics (London: Routledge, 1995); Peter Koslowski, ed. The Theory of Ethical Economy in the Historical School (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1995) and Methodology of the Social Sciences, Ethics, and Economics in the Newer Historical School, especially the essays by Ricardo Crespo, “Max Weber and Ludwig von

54.

55.

Mises, and the Methodology of the Social Sciences,” and Guy Oaks, “Value Theory and the Foundations of the Cultural Sciences: Remarks on Rickert.” Bostaph details in his dissertation, Epistemological Foundations of Methodological Conflict in Economics, the conflict within the Historical School over the metaphysi­ cal status of these empirical laws. Roscher seemed to argue as a Right Hegelian that these laws represent the universal and absolute development of the inner law of the Hegelian Spirit and Schmoller contended that they were historical and relative (pp. 13 and 89, and the whole of chapter 5 on the epistemological dimension of the Methodenstreit). For a comparative methodological overview of the two schools of eco­ nomics, see Karl Milford, “Nationalism, Volksgeist, and the Methods of Economics: A Note on Ranke, Roscher and Menger,” History of European Ideas 15, no. 1-3 (August 1992): 163-70. Milford compares the collectivism, holism, historicism, inductivism, and essentialism of Roscher against the methodological individualism, deductivism, ideal types, and positivism (explanation, prediction, and universality) of Menger. Hennis, “The Pitiless ‘Sobriety o f Judgement,’” p. 31, and Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre, p. 113. This attempt at the creation of deductive nomological laws is expanded later into the covering law model of explanation. See the works of Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968) and “Prediction and Prophecy in the Social Sciences,” in Theories of History,

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ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 276-85; and Carl Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” in Theories of History, pp. 344-56. See also Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology, pp. 205-10, who connects Weber’s theory of ideal types to that of Menger and Jellinek and to a critique of Schmoller’s method of induction and theory of empirical realism and historical reproduction. Ideal types are viewed as a heuristic aid to causal analysis of general types of behavior (medieval Christianity and modem liberalism) and not to specific empirical facts. Burger describes the dispute in Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation as that between two different forms of theoretical and historical positivism. “For both of them, scientific knowledge constituted a mental picture of the empirical phenomena in question; it was conceived as a replica of the object in the mind (p. 141). The debate was over the nature of positivism and the “correct methods of abstraction.” Part of the difficulty of locating Weber’s methodological and theoretical core has been the focus in the secondary literature on the object of Weber’s main criticism. Gordon, in his work In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism, located the main force of Weber’s criticism directed at the work of Adam Smith and neo-classical economics (p. 33), whereas Jonathan Turner, Leonard Beeghley, and Charles Powers in The Emergence of Sociological Theory (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1989), place it in the work of Karl Marx (p. 187). By contending that Weber’s main concern is with the ghost of Marx, the latter group deflects us from Weber’s main focus on neo-classical science and the Methodenstreit. For a fine introduction to the general intellectual life surrounding the Methodenstreit, Sozialokonomik (social economics), and Wirtschaftssoziologie (economic sociol­ ogy) in the nineteenth century, see Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 177206. For a developed analysis of the relationship between Knies and Weber, see Hennis, “‘A Science of Man,”’ pp. 128-40, and Max Webers Fragestellung, pp. 143-59. Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, pp. 100-01, and Oakes, Weber and Rickert, pp.79-81 In the preface to this work, Weber makes clear that he is undertaking an examination of the Historical School of economics: Roscher, Knies, and Hildebrand. However, since Hildebrand’s work relies so much on Knies and because much o f Knies methodology is a response to Roscher, Weber begins with an analysis of Roscher’s The Life, Work, and Era of Thucydides (1842), Outlines of Lectures on Political Economy according to the Historical Method (1843), essays from 1840s, and System of Economics (1854 and 1857). Roscher argues in the Grundriss (Outline of Lectures on Political Economy) that the historical method involved a Staatswirtschaft (political economy) which “is not a mere chrematistics, the art of becoming wealthy, but apolitical science in which the judgment and domination of men is at issue.” Hennis quotes Roscher in order to make the argument that, for the Historical School, economics was grounded in the classical tradition of political science that did not separate economics and ethics. The central concern of both economics and politics was social justice and the common welfare of the citizens. (‘“A Science of Man,”’ p. 118, and Max Webers Fragestellung, p. 132). Knies, too, treated economics as a moral science; it had a goal o f solving practical problems in peoples lives. Hennis quotes Schmoller’s Uber einige Grundfragen der Socialpolitik und der Volkswirtschaftslehre that economics “has once again become a great moral and political science” (p. 127, and Max Webers Fragestellung, p. 142). Both Wilhelm Hennis and Joseph Schumpeter argue con­ vincingly that Weber was a student of the Historical School.

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Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Hennis’s thesis is that even as early as the Freiburg Inaugural Address, Weber contends that “economic science is a ‘political science.”’ That is, from his early Inaugural Address at Freiburg in 1895 and the Grundriss of 1898, Weber maintains that economics is to be treated as a political science interested in the character, virtue, and development of human beings. This new science of man is not to be seen as a positivist science but as a political and moral science in the classical tradition of the Greeks. In the Grundriss of 1898, Weber’s position on the apparent ethical indiffer­ ence or neutrality of economic theory was a reaction to the normative context of the time which was beginning to make economics into a set of ultimate principles of positivism and materialism to be used for implementing state policy. Weber’s call for apparent neutrality was a heavily value-laden attempt to redirect economics back to the classical tradition with a more fundamental view of the ethical quality of human life characteristic of political science from Plato to Rousseau. “When Weber charac­ terizes economics as a science of man, we are placed not on the terrain of a (pseudo) natural science, but on the most ancient ground of political science; the mutual relation of ‘conditions of existence’ (political in the older context, social in the modem) and the quality ( ‘virtue’) of man” (p. 125, and Max Webers Fragestellung, p. 140). Hennis makes clear that Weber’s economics is an ethical and political theory concerned with human action. For Hennis this is more clearly laid out in Weber’s “radicalized subjectivity” in his essay on objectivity. See Max Weber, “The National State and Economic Policy,” trans. B. Fowkes, Economy and Society 9 (1980): 42849. Hennis is critical of both Alexander von Schelting and Dieter Henrich for missing these points about the methodological importance of political economy. They saw Weber only in terms of neo-Kantian philosophy. Friedrich Tenbruck to his credit did concerned himself with economic methodology. Finally, the Historical School held that values were historically relative which only complicated the rela­ tionship between economics and ethics and made the connection to Nietzsche easier for Weber. Bruun also notices the value content within this early period with Weber’s char­ acterization in the Inaugural Address o f economics as a Volkswirtschaftspolitik and politische Wissenschaft. But Bruun emphasizes not the hidden assumptions of clas­ sical science, but the subordination of science to nationalism and utilitarianism. Bruun argues in opposition to Hennis that Weber reverses himself in his 1904 essay on objectivity. Weber is aware in endnote number two o f “Roscher’s ‘Historical Method,”’ that these issues are better stated in Windelband’s inaugural address, “Natural Science and Historical Science”; Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History, Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science; Friedrich Gotti, Die Herrschaft des Wortes (Jena: G. Fischer Verlag, 1901); and Eduard Meyer, Zur Theorie und Methodik der Geschichte (Halle: Niemeyer Verlag, 1902). Max Weber, “Roscher’s ‘Historical Method,”’ in Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, trans. Guy Oakes (New York: The Free Press, 1975), p. 59, and “Roschers ‘historische Methode,” ’ in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1985), p. 8. Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” p. 80, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 179. For an analysis of the battle of Marathon and the Protestant Ethic as examples, see Ehud Sprinzak, “Weber’s Thesis as an Historical Explanation,” History and Theory 11, no. 3 (1972): 301-02. Toby Huff, “On the Methodology of the Social Sciences: A Review Essay,” part 1, Philosophy of Social Science 11 (December 1981): 463.

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79.

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Weber, “Roscher’s ‘Historical Method,’” p. 62, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 11. Ibid., p. 62, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 11. Ibid., p. 78, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 28. Ibid., p. 74, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 23. Ibid., p. 85, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 35. Ibid., p. 89, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 41. This issue reappears in his later methodological essay, “Basic Sociological Terms,” in Economy and Society. Here Weber distinguishes between the organic school of sociology and functionalism (pp. 14-18). Ibid., p. 91, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 42. Max Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” in Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics , p. 128, and “Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1985), p. 70. Wolfgang Mommsen, in “Ideal Type and Pure Type: Two Variants of Max Weber’s Ideal-typical Method,” in The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), recognizes that the nature of ideal types has changed in Weber’s later methodological writings from being ideal reconstructions of specific historical events to being formalized types of social action. The ideal type is usually an example of purposive-rational action (p. 127). Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” p. 129, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 70 . For an examination of Simmel’s influence on Weber, see Huff, Max Weberand the Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 59-67. Ibid., p. 180, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 121. For a detailed comparison of Dilthey and Weber, see Arnold Bergstraesser, “Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber: An Empirical Approach to Historical Synthesis,” Ethics (January 1947): 92-110. Also see Arato, “The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectiv­ ity,” for an analysis of Rickert’s and Weber’s critique of Dilthey’s psychologism (p. 126). Berger, Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation, takes the position against both Tenbruck and Freund, that interpretive sociology is not a method but rather an aspect of concept formation. This means that the sociological focus should be on questions of subjectively intended meaning and cultural values (p. 105). Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, writes that interpretation is only an auxiliary method. The real methodological problem is the formation of ideal types and causal analysis. “In his [Weber’s] view, an interpretive understanding is no more than an auxiliary means of grasping the meaning of an act, and must be confirmed by causal imputa­ tion or substantiated by statistical data” (p.100). See also Segady, Values, NeoKantianism and the Development of Weberian Methodology, pp. 70-71 and 103-05. Segady has noticed that in the secondary literature, Verstehen has either been ig­ nored as having no methodological importance or emphasized depending on whether Weber’s writings are being used to support a positivistic or interpretive sociology (p. 130). Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” p. 181, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 122. This discussion of subjective empathy and objec­ tive experience is similar to discussion about the nature of knowledge in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. What is the difference between an object of senses and an object of experience and knowledge? For an analysis o f the distinction between psychological comprehension and sociological comprehension, see Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 2, pp. 226-28. Rickert places the emphasis of transcendental understanding of meaning creation on the historical actor, whereas

206

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85.

86.

87.

88. 89. 90.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Weber’s emphasis is on the historian. This only reenforces for Aron the role of historian as the contemplative examiner of the empirically given. Thomas Schwinn, “Max Webers Verstehensbegriff,” Zeitschriftfür Philosophische Forschung 47, no. 4 (1993): 574. Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” p. 185, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 126. Ibid., p. 194, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 134. Ibid., p. 187, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 129. This same issue reappears in chapter 5 of this work. In the neo-Kantian, rationalist, and postmodernist tradition, especially with the later critique of foundationalism, the issue arises as to the nature of the complex relationship between concepts and reality. If historical reality is filtered through subjectivity, consciousness, language, or intersubjectively shared values and culture, how is access to objective reality possible so that we can test the validity of hypothetical concepts and theories of causal explanation? If there is no metaphysical reality, no thing in itself, no empirical fact, and no God’s-eye-view of the world independent of the subject— nothing that could be the ultimate ground or arbiter of truth claims— how does one adjudicate or validate historical explanations? Are we locked into these theories, as Chinese boxes, through which we attempt to understand the social world? Or are the metaphysical foundations of epistemology and method replaced by the demands for technological rationality and predictive control. These same ideas will be raised by Freud, Popper, Adorno, Quine, Kuhn, Rorty, and Habermas who sought answers in prediction, technical application, symptom-free behavior, self-enlightenment, and human eman­ cipation. Fritz Ringer, following Dieter Henrich, H. H. Bruun, and W. G. Runciman, defends a form of realism in Max Weber’s Methodology, p. 51. However, to do so, he must ignore Weber’s neo-Kantian epistemology. In the question of empirical validity of concepts, Weber is caught between his theory of history and science, cultural and general laws, neo-Kantianism and nomological laws. Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” p. 188, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 129. Weber is quite aware that this method is tied to the process o f historical rationalization (p. 191, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 131). Schluchter in Unversöhnte Moderne briefly mentions that Weber’s ethical polythe­ ism in the essay “Science as a Vocation” was intended as a critique of the universalistic claim of positivism ( Universalanspruch der Naturwissenschaften) to be the only method of science and truth (p. 229). Weber, “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” The Social Science Quarterly 22 (Spring 1981): 152, and “Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1985), pp. 429-30; and “Basic Sociological Terms” in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1978), pp. 10-21, and “Soziologische Grundbegriffe,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 549-61. Weber, “Basic Sociological Terms,” in Economy and Society, vol. 1, p. 19, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 559. Weber, “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” p. 157, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 436-37. Goddard, “Max Weber and the Objectivity of Social Science,” pp. 16-18. For Goddard, Karl Popper is a major representative of the school o f logical empiricism. See also Leszek Nowak, “Weber’s Ideal Types and Marx’s Abstractions,” Neue Hefter für Philosophie 13 (1978), who emphasizes the importance o f analytical

Max Weber and the Kantians

91. 92.

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constructions in the explanation and prediction o f events as Weber moves from an interpretive to a positivist sociology (pp. 83 and 86). Goddard, “Max Weber and the Objectivity of Social Science,” p. 16. Schroyer, The Critique of Domination, p. 126. According to Schroyer, Weber’s attempts to resolve the conflicting methods of understanding and explanation, thereby enabling him to claim that the cultural sciences are methodologically consistent with the empirical-analytic method of the natural sciences (p. 123). Though the historian uses ideal types, these are ultimately verified and tested according to the method of the natural sciences. Also concept and theory formation are totally separable from the process of interpretation so that we can analytically define concepts and con­ struct theories independent of the special processes of interpretation and under­ standing (p. 126). Toby Huff, in his essay “On the Methodology of the Social Sciences,” part I, also joins the discussion on this issue when he observes that Roscher abandons the historical and hermeneutical for the discovery of scientific laws (p. 471). Also Lelan McLemore, “Max Weber’s Defense of Historical Inquiry, History and Theory 23, no. 3 (1984): 282-83, expresses the same reservations about the relation between causal laws and interpretive analysis, and Donald McIntosh, “The Objective Bases of Max Weber’s Ideal Types,” History and Theory 16, no. 3 (1977): 266, recognizes the growing divide between the subjectively intended meaning of the historical actor and the ideal type rationality of hypothetical actors. For further discussion about possible internal contradictions within Weber’s methodology between interpretive understanding and ideal types, see G. Dux, “Gegenstand und Methode: Am Beispiel der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers,” in G. Dux and Thomas Luckmann, eds.,

Sachlichkeit: Festschrift zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von Hellmuth Plessner (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1974); Barry Hindess, Philosophy and Methodol­ ogy in the Social Sciences (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1977), pp. 24,33-39, 48, and 232; John Sewart, “Verstehen and Dialectic: Epistemology and Methodol­ ogy in Weber and Lukács,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 5, nos. 3 and 4 (July and October 1978): 319-66; Bryan Turner, For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 9; Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berke­ ley: University of California, 1989), pp. 34-36; Wagner and Zipprian, “The Problem of Reference in Max Weber’s Theory of Causal Explanation,” pp. 22-24; and Crespo, “Max Weber and Ludwig von Mises,” pp. 46-47. Hindess succinctly writes, “Weber’s concept of scientific objectivity is a logical impossibility; it contradicts the funda­ mental concepts of his epistemology” (p. 38). There is another group that argues for the integration of interpretation and expla­ nation, including Ringer, Max Weber's Methodology, pp. 92-121 and Mommsen, “Ideal Type and Pure Type,” pp. 121 -32. Some have argued that Weber is a historical realist and others that he is a heuristic nominalist. This dualism follows the split between epistemology and historical sociology on the one hand and methodology and formal science on the other. Bruun, Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology, p. 80, Cahnman, “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences,” in Weber and Toennies, pp. 35-48, Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber, 39-40, and Oakes, Weber and Rickert, p. 36, argue that Weber’s ideal types are not reproductions or mirrors of reality. Bruun also mentions the discrepan­ cies between Weber’s epistemology based on Rickert’s theories of value and Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, his critique of positivism, and his neo-Kantian theory of objectivity and truth and his methodology which logically conflicts with it (p. 97). Ringer, in Max Weber’s Methodology, argues that Weber was neither a subjectivist (empathy) nor a relativist. His principle of rationality was based on a realist theory

208

93. 94. 95.

96.

97. 98.

99. 100.

101.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason of objective validity, not unlike that found in the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, Donald Davidson, and Steven Lukes (pp. 141-42). Finally, Oakes states in the concluding chapter of his Weber and Ricken that there is no objectivity of values in Weber— only a polytheism of competing cultural systems. Oakes maintains that Weber detaches the problem of values, meaning, and objectivity (value relevance and concept formation of ideal types) from the problem of validity, causality, and explanation (application of ideal types) (p. 147). There is a conflict between Weber’s epistemology and methodology, that is, a conflict be­ tween his theory o f concept formation and his method of causal explanation. “In holding that the problem of explanation is independent of the problem of value relevance, perhaps Weber means only to assert the validity of causal explanation as a general principle is independent of the problem of value relevance” (p. 148). Oakes then writes: “If the choice among explanations requires a choice among different gods and their values, then the problem of explanation is tied to the prob­ lem of values” (p. 150). Both the subjective and objective sides, both values and science are relativized. The neo-Kantian view of social science inherited from Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert is integrated with the more radical Kantian tradition of Nietzsche. The result is a serious difficulty in Weber’s epistemology and philosophy of social science. Both Rickert and Nietzsche have similar epistemologies, but by rejecting Rickert’s universalism in favor of Nietzsche’s decisionism, Weber has created serious methodological problem of establishing a link between the subjec­ tivity of value choice and the objectivity of scientific inquiry. For Oakes, if there is any solution to the problem for Weber, it lies in the intellectual integrity and honesty of the investigator. There is no independent access to truth through an objectivity of experience or thought; no independent world that can be the basis for the adjudica­ tion of conflicting interpretations within sociology and history. Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” pp. 133-34, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 73-74. Weber, “Basic Sociological Terms,” in Economy and Society, p. 4, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 542. Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” p. 194, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 134. For an interesting analysis of Weber’s theory of causality from J. S. Mill, Kries, and Meyer, see Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology, pp. 63-80. Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” p. 194, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 134. See also “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences, “ pp. 174-75, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 277. Weber, “Knies and the Problem of Irrationality,” p. 197, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 136. Weber, “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” pp. 159-60, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 441-42. How far has Weber moved from Windelband who wrote, “It follows that all subsumption under general laws is useless in the analysis of the ultimate causes or grounds of the single, temporarily given phenomenon” in “History and Natural Science,” p. 184. Weber, “Basic Sociological Terms” in Economy and Society, p. 19, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 559. Ibid., p. 6, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 544. This is a substantive change of emphasis from the earlier essay on objectivity in which the purpose of ideal types was to isolate distinguishing and unique characteristics of historical phenomena. Ibid., pp. 13-14, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 552-54.

Max Weber and the Kantians 102.

103.

104. 105.

106. 107.

108.

109.

209

Ibid., pp. 11-12, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 550. See Hans Skjervheim, “Objectivism and the Study of Man,” part I, Inquiry 17 (Summer 1974), who interprets Weber as turning ideal types into objective social facts of official statistics (p. 236). Ibid., p. 19, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 559. Weber does allow for the possibility of doing a functionalist analysis but he views this only as a preliminary investigation to the heart of sociological inquiry into culture and inter­ pretive explanations. Ibid., p. 20, and Gesammelte Aufsätze z u r Wissenschaftslehre, p. 560. Cahnman, “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sci­ ences,” pp. 35-36 and “Ideal-Type Theory: Max Weber’s Concept and Some of Its Deviations,” in Weberand Toennies, pp. 49-50. Cahnman, “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sci­ ences,” in Weberand Toennies, p. 39. Johannes Weiss, Weber and the Marxist World, trans. Elizabeth King-Utz and Michael King (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 49-51. Following closely Lukäcs’s synthesis of Weber’s method of interpretive understanding with Marx’s historical materialism, Weiss contends that Marxist theory joins together an interest in examining meaningful social action with a recognition of reified social institutions, subjective intentionality with unconscious structures of power: “Marx­ ist theory can fulfill this (dual) task in that it fundamentally incorporates the perspec­ tive of historically acting individuals (i.e., those producing historical worlds), while it frees itself from the restrictions imposed by the empirical consciousness of social actors” (p. 56). Social reality under capitalism is no longer a product of human praxis or meaningfully determined action and thus the meaningfulness of human action and its horizons of meaning remains unconscious (p. 67). Interpretive sociol­ ogy must be supplemented by a critical materialism and the latter must be seen in conjunction with Freudian psychoanalysis where religion, politics, and economics replace sexuality as the essential element in the formation of the unconscious. Weiss combines Marx’s theory of the reification o f social institutions and Freud’s theory of repression. Weiss argues further that Marx’s use of the term ‘alienation’ implies both an interpretive and explanatory dimension. He also traces the similarity of the logical status of Weber’s theory of ideal types and objective possibility and Marx’s theory of social totality and the dialectic. Cahnman, “Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sci­ ences,” in Weber and Toennies, p. 28, and Dennis Wrong, “Max Weber,” in Max Weber, p. 22. Johannes Berger, “Die Grenzen des handlungstheoretischen Paradigmas am Beispiel der ‘soziologischen Grundbegriffe’ Max Webers,” in Materialien aus der

soziologischen Forschung: Verhandlungen des 18. Deutschen Soziologentages (München: Herman Luchterhand Verlag, 1978), p. 1085; Turner, For Weber, pp. 48-60; Marshall, In the Search of the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 58-60; Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber s Protestant Ethics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), pp. 16-26; Kalberg, Max Weber’s Com­ parative-Historical Sociology, pp. 155-62; Georg Stauth, “Kulturkritik und affirma­ tive Kultursoziologie,” p. 176; Ringer, Max Weber s Methodology, pp. 155-62; and Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology, pp. 17-20. Ringer asks: “How did Weber manage to bridge the gap between his emphasis upon human agency and his analysis of persistent historical structures” (p. 155). Berger writes that “in the methodological reduction of social phenomena to meaningful action the social-struc­ tural content flows openly into the concepts of meaningful action, which, as far as it is concerned, cannot be reduced methodologically to meaningful action” (p. 1085).

210 110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115.

116.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology, pp. 159 and 160. Kalberg, Max Weber’s Comparative-Historical Sociology, pp. 30-49. Ibid., p. 59. Stauth, “Kulturkritik und affirmative Kultursoziologie,” p. 177. But this macrosociological reduction of structure to social action must not become the basis for the epistemological and methodological reduction of structure to subjective action. Stauth makes a good case that Weber’s methodological principles of value freedom and methodological individualism have been misunderstood because of this error in interpreting Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre. Stauth investigates this issue further in the work of Marcuse and Habermas who both recognize the importance of Weber’s distinction between instrumental and value rationalization, and formal and substan­ tive reason. The model for Weber’s theory of instrumental action is Nietzsche’s idea of “formal conscience” which is geared to the practical realization of formal rational­ ity and moral values of utilitarianism (p. 178). On the other hand, Georg Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), was quite aware that the objectivity and external laws of social institutions were mere appearances caused by a failure of critical self-reflection upon history, the structures of power, and social institutions of ideology. This failure, in turn, reduces history to natural laws and power relations, i.e., to mechanical and deterministic social structures. The result, according to Lukács, is “either it [bourgeois thought] is forced to abolish the process of history and regard the institutions of the present as eternal laws of nature.. ..Or else, everything meaningful or purposive is banished from history.” By this means “history becomes fossilized in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men ’ (p. 48). Lukács maintains that the epistemological implications of Marx’s theory of reification and fetishism in Capital provide a methodological means of overcoming Weber’s methodological irrationalism and individualism without falling back into the principles of natural science (p. 49). This is the direction that will be taken by Habermas and Johannes Weiss. Wolfgang Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber ’s Develop­ mental History, trans. Guenther Roth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Randall Collins, “Weber’s Last Theory of Capitalism,” in Weberian Socio­ logical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 19-44; and David Westby, The Growth of Sociological Theory: Human Nature, Knowledge, and Social Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991), pp. 365-442. The traditional distinction between Marx as materialist and Weber as idealist is woefully inadequate and must be dropped in favor of a more complex understand­ ing of the historical and structural foundations of their works. Discussion of the relations between Marx and Weber has proceeded piecemeal. See B. B. Levine, “Methodological Ironies in Marx and Weber,” International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 1 (Fall 1986): 205-18 and Jerzy Topolski, “The Concept of Universal History in Max Weber,” Dialogue and Humanism 14 (Spring 1987): 101-08. How­ ever other works have stressed the structualist and materialist side of Weber’s theory of history. See Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage, pp. 34-35; Turner, For Weber, p. 9 and ‘The Structuralist Critique of Weber’s Sociology,” British Journal of Sociology 28, no. 1 (March 1974): 1-16; Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 120; Weiss, Weber and the Marxist World; and Peter Lassman and Irving Velody, “Max Weber on Science, Disenchantment and the Search for Meaning,” in Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation,’ ed. Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 169.

M ax W eber and the Kantians 117. 118.

119.

120. 121.

122.

211

Kalberg, Max Weber s Comparative-Historical Sociology, pp. 128-42. Wilhelm Hennis, “Max Weber’s Theme: ‘Personality and Life Orders,”’ in Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 99, and “Max W ebers Thema: ‘D ie P ersön lich k eit und die Lebensordnungen,”’ in Max Webers Fragestellung: Studien zur Biographie des Werks (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1987), p. 107. The main theme in this essay is that modem capitalism has destroyed the individual— a uni­ fied, core ‘personality’ as an integrated whole held together by a systematic ethic, personal devotion to a cause, and work in a professional vocation. In the political contest, it is the fate of man and characterized by the disappearance o f the public sphere: “The cultural problem of the age for Weber is the depersonalization of all the life orders [along with the ‘ultimate and most sublime values’] that determine human life” (p. 100, and Max Webers Fragestellung, p. 109). There is no longer any space in the iron cage, no ultimate ends, no substantive rationality by which to conduct life according to a unified personality and coherent ethical system. Turner, For Weber, pp. 54 and 59. Turner relies on the criticisms of French structural Marxists Louis Althusser, For Marx (1969) and Reading Capital, with Etienne Balibar (1970) and Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes ( 1973), who have argued that Weber’s method is humanistic, subjectivistic, and individual­ istic. With this emphasis on subjective meaning and conscious intentions of social action, Weber has lost the ability to examine reified social relationships and objective social institutions which stand deterministically above and outside the individual. Neo-Kantian methodological individualism and Weber’s own Nietzschean and Prot­ estant value assumptions hamper the analysis of collectives, structures, and power relationships. The true object of a critical political economy, for Poulantzas, is the objective structures and social relations of production (p. 42). Turner, For Marx, pp. 53 and 54. In their work Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker (London: Routledge, 1994), Stephen Turner and Regis Factor argue that there are fundamentally two types of action and causality: subjectively intended and biological action. The former is self-consciously willed on the basis o f intentional meaning and the latter is a meaningless reaction to circumstances. In sociology, causality is examined on the basis of self-conscious meaning only (pp. 39-44). There is no third form of social action which would correspond to action within reified and objectified social insti­ tutions. The classical tradition with its emphasis on alienation, rationalization, and collective consciousness disappears. And with it very important sociological ques­ tions. It is also here that the relationship between methodology and social philoso­ phy (Protestantism and liberalism) can be most clearly seen. This is a very narrow interpretation of the range of methodological issues found in Weber’s writings. On the other side, an equally narrow borrowing from Weber appears in Talcott Parsons’s work The Structure of Social Action where he writes: “For one o f his [Weber’s] major themes throughout his work was that of the importance of scientifically verifiable knowledge of human affairs as a guide to rational action. Moreover in just this connection he strongly emphasized the need for general, theoretical knowledge” (p. 595). Parsons takes Weber basic sociological categories and abstracts them from his historical sociology, thereby making them theoretical autonomous. Neither Turner and Factor nor Parsons captures the full range of Weber’s sociological method of integrating the method o f Verstehen with causal analysis of historically concrete events and structures. Rather they abstract from his historical research and empha­ size either subjective meaning or positivist science. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 54, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, p. 37.

212 123. 124. 125.

126. 127.

128.

129.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Arato, “The Neo-Idealist Defense of Subjectivity,” pp. 140-41. Weber, “Basic Sociological Terms” in Economy and Society , pp. 9-10, and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 548. Karl Löwith, “Max Weber’s Position on Science,” in Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation, ’ ed. Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 146-47. Here there is an interesting analysis of the integration of ethics and science and the “objectification of ideas” through value relevance as the basis for later scientific inquiry. Schroyer, The Critique of Domination, p. 126. Ringer takes a more favorable view of the success of Weber’s ability to bridge these differences in his Wissenschaftslehre. In Max Weber’s Methodology, he defends Weber by arguing that social structures and social groups represent complex pat­ terns o f personal intentions, subjective meanings, and individual actions that are conceptualized as ideal types. But to do this, Ringer introduces a distinction between rational, conscious action and the existence of unconscious structures. Though Ringer is adamant that Weber “never abandoned his commitment to the rational individual and the initial hypothesis of the interpretive method” (p. 160), his general categories do permit him to deal with broader structural issues (pp. 155-62). This way of conceptualizing individual and group action does not seem to solve the problem because the method of understanding subjective intentions is not the same method used for studying or explaining historical structures. Ringer’s argument is also contested by Oakes in WeberandRickert, who contends that the splits between epistemology and method, values and ideal types, the problem of objectivity and the problem of causation, and values and explanation are never bridged (pp. 146-52). Oakes summarizes Rickert’s position that issues of industrialization, urbanization, and democracy are amenable to this sort of analysis if they are understood by reference to individual meaning and value (pp. 80-81). That is, if sociology is reduced to questions of human agency and methodological individualism. But as he notes, there are entirely others issues that this method is not capable of examining. For an interesting overview of the secondary literature, including the works of Burger, Oakes, Henrich, Bruun, and Runciman, over these questions, see Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology, pp. 51-52. Rasmussen, “Between Autonomy and Sociality,” pp. 8-9 and Mark Warren, “Nietzsche and Weber: When Does Reason Become Power?” in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 73-74 and note 16, p. 92.

Part 2 Methodological Disputes in the Twentieth Century: Rationalism, Hermeneutics, and Critical Theory

4 Critical Rationalism and Critical Theory: Popper, Adorno, Habermas, and Albert Many of the same issues about the logic and concept formation in social science that were the focus of attention in nineteenth-century Germany became the center of dispute again in the twentieth cen­ tury. This time questions about objectivity, rationality, and ethics centered around the famous positivist dispute. An analysis of these discussions can easily become very esoteric and confusing due to the myriad of competing schools of methodology and epistemology from analytic philosophy, logical empiricism, logical positivism, pragmatism, historicism, existentialism, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, and critical theory. This chapter fo­ cuses on the debate between critical theory and critical rationalism in the 1960s. In 1961 at a conference held in Tübingen by the German Socio­ logical Association, Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno locked horns in a heated discussion surrounding the famous Positivismusstreit (positivist dispute). They were following in the tradition of Menger and Schmoller, who as we have already seen, argued about the sci­ entific character of economics in the 1880s. They, in turn, were fol­ lowed by the neo-Kantians: Windelband, Rickert, and Weber, who, at the end of the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century, pur­ sued answers to questions concerning the nature of knowledge and methodology in the social sciences. These debates continued through­ out the early part of the twentieth century in the famous journal, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, edited by Max We­ ber, Edgar Jaffé, and Werner Sombart. In the mid-1960s, the discussion was again pursued by Hans Albert and Jürgen Habermas. What began as tht Methodenstreit and 215

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Werturteilsstreit of the nineteenth century evolved into the Positivismusstreit of the mid- and late twentieth century. Though the debate over the critique of positivism was joined initially by repre­ sentatives of critical rationalism and critical theory, it later branched out into discussions involving hermeneutics, phenomenology, sys­ tems theory, post-analytic philosophy, political and liberation theol­ ogy, feminism, neo-Marxism, and so forth. The initial dispute in the 1960s will be examined by following the methodological analyses of Adorno, Popper, Albert, and Habermas. The Popper-Adorno Debate on Objectivity and Method The Popper and Adorno debate in Tübingen produced another round of fascinating discussions surrounding issues of the concepts, logic, and methods of social science. Both men claimed to reject empiricism and positivism as a metaphysics inappropriate for socio­ logical inquiry. But on closer analysis the critique of positivism was transformed into an examination of the nature and definition of posi­ tivism itself.1 Out of this discussion came the recognition that meth­ odological issues of the rules and norms of scientific inquiry could not be examined separately from issues of social theory, since the method by which one approached the study of modern industrial society was defined to some extent by the structures, consciousness, and problems exhibited by that society. Weber was aware of this relationship between methods and theory, but did not pursue it sys­ tematically. This relationship is best seen initially in the treatment of objectivity by Popper and Adorno. For Popper, objectivity refers to “scientific objectivity” and the interests of science, whereas Adorno uses the term “social objectivity” to refer to the totality of relation­ ships, values, and structures in society. In both cases, theory guides the discussion about methods. Popper began the symposium with a summary outline in twentyseven theses introducing his philosophy of social science. This es­ say, “The Logic of the Social Sciences,” was intended to produce a greater clarity of the differences between his critical rationalism and Adorno’s critical theory, and thereby facilitate a more fruitful dis­ cussion between them. He placed the issue of social science in the framework of Socratic ignorance and Heraclitean flux. Our under­ standing of the social and natural worlds always involves a dialectic between ignorance and knowledge. Everything is constantly chang­ ing and any claim to truth is quickly replaced by the recognition of

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how little we actually know about the world. According to Popper, this tension between knowledge and ignorance should be the start­ ing point of any discussion about methodology and logic in the so­ cial sciences. It leads him to the start of his fourth thesis: “Knowl­ edge does not start from perceptions or observations or the collec­ tion of data or facts, but it starts, rather, from problems.”2 In lan­ guage that anticipates Kuhn’s theory of paradigm puzzle-solving and relies on the conventionalism of Henri Poincare and Pierre Duhem, Popper begins with a critique of positivism. There is no pure observational language, no inductive generalizations, and no a priori valid principles. Science does not begin with neutral observa­ tion, measurements, and the collection of empirical data, nor does it conclude with general theories. Rather, theories are simply useful, problem-solving tools which are neither true nor false and, there­ fore, cannot be justified on the basis of empirical observations. Pop­ per accepts the rejection of empiricism and inductivism, as well as the critique of naturalism and scientism, but refuses to push the ar­ gument any further. He still maintains that there is a critical method which is capable of intersubjectively testing the validity of scientific theories through deduction and falsification.3 By laying the founda­ tions for a critique of dogmatic reason, he is continuing to develop ideas from his earliest writings. In 1934 Karl Popper published his famous work, The Logic o f Scientific Discovery, in which he attempted to provide the natural sciences with clear methodological foundations. It produced a pro­ found effect in the philosophical community as he read past Hume’s defense of positivism and revived the latter’s skeptical arguments about the justification of science in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Popper’s assault on both empiricism and in­ ductive logic was grounded in Hume’s own original problem of jus­ tification that had been conveniently misplaced for nearly two hun­ dred years. There had always been a tension between Hume’s em­ piricism and skepticism but the history of philosophy had tended to rely almost exclusively on the former. Replying to the generally ac­ cepted view of the natural sciences, Popper revisits Hume’s episte­ mology when he argues that universal statements cannot be derived from the accumulation of many singular experiences. For example, the statement, “All swans are white,” is derived in just this manner and Popper, following Hume, argues that it is not logically justifi­ able. No matter how many observed instances of white swans there

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may have been in the past, there is no logical justification for this universal statement. It may correspond to all the rules of common sense, but there remains a problem of how one philosophically jus­ tifies the obvious. After examining the logical justifications for sci­ ence based upon experience and the nature of rational inference, Hume wrote that “it is impossible, therefore, that any argument from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resem­ blance.”4 He concluded that in the final analysis the principle of causality and the inferences from experience are simply psycho­ logical connections that the mind makes through subjective habit. Popper is aware of Hume’s refutation of inductive reasoning and the logical problem of infinite regress.5 The statement about all swans being white appears true because all previous observations of swans have shown them to be a distinct color. In the end, Popper, too, agrees that inductive inferences are logically unjustifiable since they must incorporate inductive reasoning into the proof of induction it­ self which commits the logical fallacy of infinite regress—utilizing the very thing that itself requires justification. Induction is used as the basis for justifying inductive inferences. Popper concludes by arguing that the principle of induction can­ not provide science with the secure logical and methodological foun­ dation which it requires. He recognizes the immensity of the issue at stake. Quoting from H. Reichenbach, he writes, “To eliminate it [the principle of induction] from science would mean nothing less than to deprive science of its power to decide the truth or falsity of its theories. Without it, clearly, science would no longer have the right to distinguish its theories from the fanciful and arbitrary creations of the poet’s mind.”6 Against the overwhelming acceptance of this prin­ ciple among scientists, Popper maintains that it is superfluous and logically inconsistent. Experience and induction can never be the foundation for universal statements or scientific knowledge. Instead, he argues that the origins of ideas or theories making claims to uni­ versal validity is a psychological question and not an epistemologi­ cal or logical one. Science begins where history, imagination, and inspiration leave off. He is no longer concerned with the older ap­ proaches of epistemology that begin by tracing ideas back to their origins in impressions or experience. Rather, he begins with these ideas and seeks answers to their justification or validity in practice by deducing predictive statements from their original insights and

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testing them against experience. Ideas cannot be verified as abso­ lutely true by showing how they mirror impressions, but can, in fact, be falsified when their predictions are shown not to come true. Pop­ per has transplanted the logical validation of science from induction to deduction, from a logic of discovery to a logic of justification. Popper expands upon Kantian philosophy by rethinking the cri­ tique of reason in the social sciences. There are no pure observa­ tions or data from which science can begin its inquiry. Rather, ob­ servation is mediated by ideas, experience by theory. Practical prob­ lems, scientific interests, and social institutions serve as guiding the selection process in forming the objects of experience. They represent the transcendental conditions for the possibility of scien­ tific knowledge. Popper replaces Kant’s categories of the intuition and understanding with the categories of a critical method. Both the nature of the problem to be solved and the scientific interests in explanation, causality, precision, and control direct our attention and form the objects of our experience. “‘Experience,’ on this view, appears as a distinctive method...”7 As a result, Popper rejects vari­ ous aspects of positivism, including the foundation of science in empiricism, the existence of empirical objectivity and epistemo­ logical realism, the justification of inductive logic, the favored sta­ tus of atomic or protocol sentences, infinite regress of foundationalism, and the verification principle of truth. By also rejecting the idea that knowledge is grounded in perception in the fourth thesis, he criticizes logical positivism which held that the meaning of a proposition lay in its ability to reflect and verify mean­ ing in empirical reality. For Popper, scientific hypotheses and laws cannot be built upon the inductive accumulation of observations; nor can they be verified by observation. With this criticism he places the cornerstone of the works of A. J. Ayer, Rudolf Carnap, Bertrand Russell, and the early Wittgenstein in doubt. Opposed to the epistemology of logical posi­ tivism, he argues that knowledge begins with a disturbance that some new facts do not fit the accepted scientific theory. Popper views this problematic contradiction between facts and theory, ignorance and knowledge as the beginning of new knowledge about the world. As we receive new information concerning practical problems in soci­ ety, such as issues about poverty, illiteracy, political suppression, legal rights, etc., we are forced to reconsider our former ideas. The starting point of science then is an “observation which creates a prob-

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lem” and forces us to call into question our previously accepted ideas. By this means, he offers us another approach to the formation of scientific laws, the accumulation of knowledge, concept forma­ tion, and the logic of the social sciences than that provided by posi­ tivism. In Conjectures and Refutations (1962), Popper again argues that the awareness of our errors and ignorance is the true beginning of knowledge. Rejecting the foundations of knowledge in the author­ ity of the given, he turns to Xenophanes, Democritus, Socrates, Nicolas of Cusa, and Erasmus who articulated a close relationship between the search for knowledge and human fallibility.8 “The West­ ern rationalist tradition, which derives from the Greeks, is the tradi­ tion of critical discussion—of examining and testing propositions or theories by attempting to refute them.”9 Neither the senses nor rea­ son are capable of offering us an authoritative access to true knowl­ edge (episteme). Neither the senses nor reason are totally reliable, since all observation requires some theoretical guidance or “horizon of expectation.” Reason is tied to an external, divine tradition and a pessimistic epistemology of manifest truth that splits the world be­ tween false and unreal appearances and a true, but for the most part, unknowable reality.10 Popper contends that the second position, in particular, breeds suspicion, fanaticism, and authoritarianism, since it holds that only the wicked refuse to admit the truth manifest for all to see and everyone must be guided by those who know the truth. This is most clearly expressed in Plato’s theory of the cave in the Republic. In order to bypass these problems, Popper calls for a critical ratio­ nalism in which the origins or sources of knowledge become irrel­ evant and are replaced by a critical assessment of various claims to truth. “What we should do, I suggest, is to give up the idea of ulti­ mate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes.”11 Theories can no longer be confirmed or verified by being traced back to some ultimate source in experience or reason; they can only be temporarily and tentatively established as true through a process of methodological testability and falsifiability. These latter principles are the only basis upon which to distinguish science from metaphysics. “A system is to be considered as scientific only if it makes assertions which may clash with observation; and a system is, in fact, tested by attempts to produce such clashes, that is to say

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by attempts to refute it. Thus testability is the same as refutability, and can therefore likewise be taken as a criterion of demarcation.”12 The only appropriate scientific method is the critical method of trial and error, conjecture and refutation.13 Theories are not accepted because they reflect reality or are ca­ pable of being verified empirically. Scientific objectivity is not grounded in ontology, but rather is a product of a critical, scientific inquiry. “The so-called objectivity of science lies in the objectivity of the critical method.”14 Objectivity becomes synonymous with the scientific procedure, deductive method, critical reflection, and pub­ lic discourse; objectivity is determined by following the correct pro­ cedures and forming concepts by means of the scientific method. There is no recourse to some metaphysical grounding in first prin­ ciples or empirical reality. Popper is aware that scientific objectivity also rests on extra-scientific values of politics and society: competi­ tion, tradition, social institutions of publishers, universities, confer­ ences, research institutes, etc., and the tolerance and free discussion protected by the state.15 There is no difference at this level between the social and natural sciences.16 An outline of the scientific method of critical rationalism follows in the sixth thesis: problems initiate scientific inquiry; attempts are made to explain and predict new phe­ nomena; new explanatory theses and tentative solutions are gener­ ated; new conjectures and theories are subject to reproduction, testing, rational discussion, and refutation; theories are independently tested within the scientific community; and, finally, they are temporarily accepted if they pass this rigorous and systematic scientific criti­ cism. There is also a sense of progress in which each new round of inquiry results in theories that improve upon the previous ones and cautiously and slowly approach the truth. “The method of science is one of tentative attempts to solve our problems.” The technically superior theory which solves the problem under investigation better approximates the truth because its theory can explain more than any other for the moment. In the seventh thesis, Popper rejects inductive logic as a possible foundation for social science. Claims to scientific truth can never be proven or verified or even stated in probability form. They can only be temporarily sustained as tentative solutions within a method of open debate and continuous criticism. Those theories making scien­ tific claims that are not amendable to this critical method, such as Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, are not scientific.17 Popper

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rejects what he calls “misguided naturalism” or scientism, which assumes a certain mythological and slavish view of the natural sci­ ences and wishes to apply its method to the social sciences. Natural­ ism begins with observation, induction, generalizations, and ends with theory construction. This form of scientific objectivity distorts both the natural and social sciences with a crude scientism. Popper argues for an objective and value-free social science though he is aware of the diffi­ culty, if not impossibility, of realizing this ideal in practice. At this point in his analysis, he mistakenly feels that he is comfortably echo­ ing the same criticisms of positivism as the critical theorists. Popper continues to criticize the idea of behavioristic objectivity that stresses the distancing and removal of the scientist from the objects of investigation. He is adamant in emphasizing that objectiv­ ity rests not with the attitude or perspective of the individual scien­ tist but with the methodological procedures of science itself. Valuefree sociology is an ideal which presupposes its own normative prin­ ciples and is almost impossible to realize in practice. This can be compensated for by a critical method that involves conjectures, criti­ cisms, and refutations. Whatever the origins of an idea or theory, public criticism within the scientific community will ultimately de­ termine its objectivity and validity. “The objectivity of science is not a matter of the individual scientists but rather the social result of their mutual criticism, of the friendly-hostile division of labor among scientists, of their co-operation and also of their competition.”18 Epistemology has slipped into sociology, fact into convention, objectivity into social institution, as the guardian of scientific knowl­ edge lies in the nature of liberal competition, openness, and dia­ logue among scientists. Objectivity as experience is a reflection not of empirical reality but of social conventions—competition, tradi­ tion, social institutions, and a liberal state. Only in liberalism do we have the myriad social institutions, which nurture and encourage individual inquisitiveness, competition among differing opinions and schools of thought, respect for criticism and debate, and a public forum for debate in journals, conferences, etc. For Popper, objectiv­ ity is related to the values and institutions of liberal democracy. The latter is the filter through which personal values and ideologies are screened through public analysis and criticism; dogmas are refuted and intellectual pluralism and diversity are ensured. This connec­ tion between knowledge and liberalism is crucial for the critical ra­ tionalism of Popper.

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Popper recognizes that values and “interests” cannot be elimi­ nated from science. But a distinction can be made between scientific interests and extra-scientific interests. Underlying the scientific en­ terprise is the search for truth, the relevance and significance of in­ formation to the problems under discussion, and the values of fruit­ fulness, explanatory power, simplicity, and precision. These are the underlying ideals within science. They are the values of technical or instrumental rationality examined by Weber in “Science as a Voca­ tion.” Popper is aware of the relation between knowledge and hu­ man interests but wishes to distinguish those values appropriate for science that lie in domination and control of the social material. “Theories are nets cast to catch what we call ‘the world’: to rational­ ize, to explain, and to master it.”19 The goal of scientific inquiry is the establishment of tentative solutions to practical and theoretical problems by producing theories capable of explaining and predict­ ing causal relationships in society. Prediction represents the other logical side of explanation since both involve the relationship be­ tween cause and effect.20 Prediction looks for the future effects of empirical events, whereas explanation seeks the cause in universal laws and initial conditions. This is accomplished by subsuming the problem or explicandum under a universal covering-law which es­ tablishes its initial empirical conditions and produces a solution by explaining the problem through logical derivation or inference from the theory.21 Given the initial conditions a, b, c, d, etc., established by the theory, the following effects will occur. Or given a certain end, these are the most efficient means for accomplishing this end. Following John Stuart Mill’s analysis of causal explanation in On the Logic o f the Moral Sciences, and expanding upon it, Popper offers in The Logic of Scientific Discovery a model for the joining of a universal law with initial empirical conditions in his example of the breaking of a thread. Knowing the thickness and strength of a piece of thread, that a weight of two pounds was placed on it, and that its tensile strength or carrying capacity is only one pound, we can deductively predict the effect that it will break because it is fol­ lowing a universal law of nature.22 Events are explained and theo­ ries are tested by comparing the anticipated prediction from the uni­ versal law and initial conditions (cause) with the actual occurrence (effect). Explanation and objective validity involve the deduction of anticipated results and the intersubjective testing of all causally re­ lated predictions. Thus, for Popper following Mill and Carl Menger,

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there is a unity of method between the natural and social sciences in which explanation, prediction, and testing become the basis for truth claims.23 Explanation of a particular event and testing of a universal and hypothetical theory are undertaken by means of a successful prediction of an event through its subsumption under initial condi­ tions and causal laws. Events are thus explained and tested through their successful prediction. Theories are refuted when deductive inferences produce logi­ cally unacceptable conclusions which cannot be used to solve prob­ lems created within the original theory. In his work, The Poverty of Historicism (1957), Popper labels this scientific approach, “social technology” or “social engineering.” Truth is ultimately determined by the ability of science to engineer social and technical problems out of existence. It selects the problems and determines the solu­ tions. However, science cannot define the ends which are “beyond the province of technology.”24 It can only design the social institu­ tions and offer solutions to their efficient and practical running. Science remains indifferent to social purpose, moral values, and political ideals and thus ultimately remains silent to social critique. Reason is reduced to an instrumental rationality and measurement of the relationship of means to ends within a given social structure. It treats society as “a machine rather than as an organism” and social engineering always involves piecemeal changes in solving technical problems.25 Having rejected empiricism and positivism, Popper is, however, caught in a dilemma. How are scientific theories refuted after the possible grounding of refutation in epistemological realism has been rejected? Popper is aware of the existential nihilism that lies waiting in a sociology of knowledge of which he is very critical. The answer is that in his efforts to get out of the logical difficulty of rejecting both empiricism and relativism, he slips back into a mode of think­ ing that he initially rejected—the criterion of “objective truth.” He writes in the twentieth thesis: “We term a proposition ‘true’ if it cor­ responds to the facts, or if things are as described by the proposi­ tion. This is what is called the absolute or objective concept of truth which each of us constantly uses.”26 Where Weber conceived of sociology as historical science distinct from the natural sciences, Popper turns it into a nomothetic and explanatory science in which laws, rules, and causal explanation define its main characteristics. “To give a causal explanation of an event means to deduce a state-

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ment which describes it, using as premises of the deduction one or more universal laws, together with certain singular statements, the initial conditions.”21 Finally, like Weber, Popper ends his analysis with a serious and unresolved dilemma. He is not aware or does not discuss that there is a fundamental methodological difference be­ tween problems generated by structural issues within the social sys­ tem, such as poverty, political suppression, etc., and questions about the nature of individually intended meaning. Certainly problems of social structure would entail different sociological approaches and methods then those generated by a hermeneutical concern with ques­ tions of subjective meaning, purpose, and ideals. By following too closely the Kantian tradition, he has attempted to fit sociology into the particular methodological framework of critical rationalism with­ out recognizing that methodology is also a response to the types of issues under discussion—structuralism, historical analysis, social critique, hermeneutics, etc. Adorno’s Dialectical Method and the Limits of Empirical Research Adorno responds to Popper’s essay by agreeing with his critique of empiricism, scientism, dogmatism, historical relativism, and value freedom. He also supports Popper’s theory of science grounded in problems, criticism, refutation, and values. He will merely provide another interpretive twist to the meaning of these logical and meth­ odological categories. Adorno thus transforms Popper’s basic logi­ cal categories and methodological individualism into his own method of critical theory. There are many examples of Adorno changing the meaning of Popper’s terminology throughout the essay: the concept of “problem,” as an anomalous experience, technical difficulty, and inner contradiction between facts and knowledge, is redefined as a problem of social totality and social justice; “criticism,” as honest, intersubjective testability of explanatory theories against factual re­ ality, is redefined as social contradictions and dialectical conscious­ ness; “refutation,” as causal or explanatory inadequacy, is redefined as immanent critique and determinate negation; and “values,” as methodological interests in instrumental control and technical ad­ ministration, are redefined as self-enlightenment, freedom, and so­ cial ideals (Begriffe). For Popper, methodology is a self-reflective and self-critical discipline which examines the internal logical struc­ ture, categories, propositions, and theories of social science. Adorno

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proceeds to widen the discussion to include a broader notion of sci­ ence and objectivity. He wishes to move beyond an examination of the general rules and logic of the social sciences to an analysis of the content and method of social theory itself. Methodology for him involves a reflection on the different forms of scientific inquiry ad­ equate to the concept of the object (society); epistemological and methodological self-criticism are transformed into social theory. A major difference between the two lies in their appropriation of Kant’s critique of pure reason. Both men claim that their sociologi­ cal method is critical and trace their intellectual origins back to Kant and Hegel. Popper raises questions about the Kantian logic of sci­ ence and replaces the subjective categories of the understanding with the transcendental interests and critical method in technical problem solving. Instrumental categories of technical reason create the ob­ jects of scientific inquiry. The critical method forms the objects and theories of sociology. He lays out the technical features and rigor­ ous procedures by which theories are developed and come to be accepted as provisionally true. Adorno, on the other hand, approaches the logic of the social sciences and concept formation from the op­ posite direction; as with Habermas later, it is not method which de­ termines objectivity and theory, it is theory which defines method. Adorno rejects the idea that “in general, the objectivity of empirical social research is an objectivity of the methods, not of what is inves­ tigated.”28 Borrowing more from the Hegelian dialectic and phe­ nomenology, he develops a general theory of society which, in turn, becomes the basis for his reflections on methodology and concept formation. Since observational data are always filtered and struc­ tured through the context of the social whole, methodological issues also reflect the history, structure, and potentiality of social institu­ tions—the social totality. The method of analysis must also reflect society as an integrated social system with all its internal contradictions, class conflicts, his­ torical origins, and forms of consciousness and ideology. The diver­ sity of methods appropriate to these issues lies in a structural politi­ cal economy, historical sociology, social psychology, and a critique of ideology and depth hermeneutics. To reduce sociology to simply a systematic collection of empirical data based on the traditional approach of positivism is to lose the very concept of society to the nominalism and relativism of a nomothetic science.29 As Adorno says, “Methods do not rest upon methodological ideals but rather

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upon reality.”30 Sociology cannot be indifferent to the study of soci­ ety as a whole and, therefore, methodology must be a response to the nature of the object under investigation, rather than a conformity to the logic and abstract needs of the method itself. Sociology can only back into a philosophy of social science by focusing upon the object and context of inquiry. This insight provides an important key to understanding Habermas’s later discussions in these areas. The complexity of reality defines sociology, not the technical inter­ ests of methodology itself or the assumptions of liberalism which underlie it. In the latter situation, the means becomes the end and theory is reduced to a formal rationality and professional discipline for administrative decision making. For Adorno, the traditional method of sociology leads to a frag­ mentation and dissolution of the discipline. But the latter should not “permit itself to be terrorized by the academic division of labor”31 which separates sociology from philosophy, economics, and his­ tory. Adorno uses the term “terror” when referring to the method­ ological interests of openness and honesty as value freedom in so­ cial science. The abandonment of a defenseless sociologist to the power and control of immediate reality when one is merely a pas­ sive collector and calculator of empirical observation is unconscio­ nable.32 Concepts are empty abstractions and fetishized forms of nominalism because they are no longer defined in terms of the or­ ganic whole and social totality. Their integrated system of scientific propositions form a reified objectivity because they are used for­ mally to manage social problems. Adorno fears the totalitarianism implicit in this variation of Comtean sociology where social change is directed by technological and economic elites from above. By concentrating on the immediately given reality, reason becomes in­ different to a whole area of investigation and, thereby, fails to cap­ ture the complex and interrelated features of modem industrial soci­ ety. It falls silent to the power of the immediately given. From this perspective, sociology merely reflects the existing reality without a critical ability to judge it self-consciously. The ability to undertake analysis and ethical judgments about the underlying structures and institutions of bourgeois society, their origins in medieval commerce and mercantilist capitalism, their forms of legitimation in Enlighten­ ment rationality and science, their connections to scientific and tech­ nological development, and their impact on cultural and political ideals of liberalism and democracy, is lost. As Adorno so elegantly

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puts it: “The usual empirical asceticism with regard to theory cannot be sustained.”33 Positivist research, geared to data collection, is in­ capable of comprehending the structural and historical whole of modem social institutions or the dialectical interrelationships among the interacting subsystems. Playing off the beginning of Popper’s essay, Adorno contends that sociology does begin with a problem, and the problem to be examined is society itself. According to Popper, methodology produces objectivity, whereas for Adomo, objectivity is produced by the social reality, which is the underlying “inner mechanism of society.” Social science usually examines the phenomena that appear as observational data and em­ pirical facts. But Adorno recognizes that the social totality is not immediately available to empirical observation. It is not amendable to immediate empirical investigation because “some thoughts and, in the last instance, the essential ones recoil from [empirical] tests...[and can] never be reduced to particular experimental arrange­ ments.”34 By reducing criticism to systematic testing, observed facts, and the correspondence between knowledge and facts, albeit in the form of critical rationalism, Popper has undermined the possibility of serious social critique by leaving the individual defenseless against the imposition and domination of immediate appearances. Adorno recognizes that facts are always socially mediated and turns to Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional and critical theory to elucidate this.35 If facts are constituted as social phenomena, then a methodology based on an objective, value-free science is impos­ sible. It is a question of which interests and values are accepted as scientifically appropriate. And the methodological dispute takes an­ other interesting turn. Max Horkheimer in his famous essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” published in 1937, outlines the basic differences between traditional positivist theory and critical theory. Basing the former on Descartes’s analytic method and Husserl’s mathematical and deduc­ tive method, traditional theory follows the approach of the natural sciences. How the initial principles of the natural scientific model are developed—whether through induction (Mill), insight (Leibniz), arbitrary postulates, etc.—is not important. Only the systematic or­ dering within a logical mathematical system produces hypothetical statements which are then “verified” in empirical reality in the form of explanation and prediction. Horkheimer offers an example of this method from the discussion between Eduard Meyer and Max We-

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ber. Meyer contended that it would be impossible to argue that a particular historical decision by a prominent leader was a crucial element in starting a war. If that decision had not been made, then the war would not have occurred. Weber, in his essay “Critical Stud­ ies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences” (1906), developed his theory of objective possibility, adequate causality, and historical reconstruc­ tion in response. He argued that it is possible to develop explanatory and causal relationships between historical events. Given initial his­ torical circumstances a, b, c, and d, then event q would occur. If any element in the equation was missing, then q would not have oc­ curred. Horkheimer has reduced Weber to a simple positivist with an instrumental approach to science.36 (Though it has been argued in chapter 3 that this is an inadequate and incomplete rendering of Weber’s historical sociology, it does help highlight Horkheimer’s theory of traditional social science.) Using this method, both history and theory become lost in logic and method as mere utilitarian cat­ egories for technical application toward prediction and control. Just as industrial production in the workplace is fragmented by an arbi­ trary but useful division of labor separating conception from execu­ tion, manual labor from intellectual labor, unskilled worker from skilled worker,37 so, too, in the methodology of social science, thought is separated from the physical. In both cases, the object, whether in production and work or the study of society, is made to conform to the directives of the guiding method of bourgeois pro­ duction and bourgeois science. History is reconstructed according to the logic of causal rules, technical control, and practical applica­ bility. The purpose of this type of theory is simplicity, precision, and consistency based on the same technical interests as found in the natural sciences for ordering experience and constructing hypoth­ eses. These interests in prediction and control are extra-scientific values of a particular calling or profession. They are grounded in the technical achievements and Enlightenment rationality of bour­ geois society whose purpose is “accumulated knowledge which is really applied to reality in the great industrial factories” and whose final end is “the conservation and continuous renewal of the exist­ ing state of affairs.”38 That is, they are themselves sociological and capitalist phenomena. Horkheimer offers a critique of both empiricism and rationalism by developing a social epistemology. The objects of immediate ex­ perience are mediated through the social and historical categories of

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the understanding so that the objects we see are products of a certain type of social organization of production and architectural results of a particular economic and political system. Reality is socially con­ stituted. Developing an argument contained in Marx’s essay “Pri­ vate Property and Communism,”39 Horkheimer examines the prior social formation of both sense perception and the understanding. “The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ.”40 Bor­ rowing an example from the work of David Gordon—the physical descriptions of the cities, suburbs, shopping malls, agricultural fields, etc., are products of the geography and landscape of advanced capi­ talist societies. The contemporary cities of institutional glass featur­ ing insurance and medical companies, hospitals, banks, schools and universities are quite different from earlier American cities whose center was either a church or factory.41 Changes in the market, the nature of monopoly capitalism, fragmented work and scientific man­ agement, corporate restructuring, and deindustrialization of America, have changed the physical arrangement and consciousness of mod­ ern urban and rural life. Neither sensation nor the categories of the understanding are a priori, transcendental, or universal, but funda­ mentally social and historical. What we hear, taste, smell, and see is a product of a certain type of mode of production. Our experiences and worldviews in a mercantilist, liberal, or advanced capitalist so­ ciety are unquestionably different. Objective reality is inaccessible except to a consciousness which is historically and socially condi­ tioned. Traditional science fetishizes the objects under investigation by abstracting them from the concrete conditions of social reality. Adorno, in another essay, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” ex­ amines the method of data collection and statistical analysis in ques­ tionnaires and interviews. He concludes that positivism hides the deeper social objectivity of “the conditions, institutions, and forces within which human beings act.”42 These methods only tabulate the socially preformed consciousness and attitudes of the participants without the self-criticism necessary for a critical science. Traditional methods systematically exclude issues which might call both the methods and society into question. Methodological objectivity dis­ torts social objectivity; critical rationalism represses critical self-re­ flection; and hypostatized methods conceal alienation and the fe-

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tishism of the commodity. With positivist science, the ability to for­ mulate legitimately critical issues is lost since the language neces­ sary to conceptualize critical questions is not available. If the method itself forms the objects of perception, defines the logic of analysis, legitimates particular social problems, and justifies the logic of sci­ ence, then the theories which penetrate beneath the phenomenal appearances into the depth structures of society and call these struc­ tures into question are not valid forms of scientific knowledge. As in the case of Popper, Adorno, too, views the scientific method as a reflection of the discursive reason of democratic politics. Posi­ tivism is another form of consciousness of modem liberalism since popular opinions never reach beyond the surface phenomena; they are statistical averages without differentiation and reflect subjective perceptions and false consciousness. Humans are reduced to math­ ematical occurrences and statistical objects defined by the socio­ logical method. Individuals are important only to the extent that they are part of a comprehensive scientific survey or election poll. “The method is likely both to fetishize its object and, in turn, to degener­ ate into a fetish” and in the process “the dignity of the objects to be examined is frequently replaced by the objectivity of the findings.”43 By being indifferent to the real object of scientific inquiry, positivist methodology creates an arbitrary world of abstract objects which appear to be real and concrete, but only recreate the structures of class power and oppression within society. It raises the observable reality to a metaphysical principle and its corresponding method to a “superstition.” It is the “Medusan mirror to a society” since sci­ ence and politics merely reflect the inherent passivity, atomistic con­ sumerism, and mindless adaptation of the citizens to modernity. Any possible awareness of this problem is, in turn, repressed since posi­ tivism separates sociology from philosophy—the method separates itself from any language which could undertake a critical self-re­ flection. “Then empirical social research wrongly takes the epiphenomenon—what the world has made of us—for the object itself.”44 However, they are not unimportant, since empirical research does produce the appearances behind which lie the essential structures of society. “Appearance is always also an appearance of essence and not mere illusion.”45 Opinion research takes the subjective meaning of individual con­ sciousness (Rousseau’s will of all) for an hypostatized reality with­ out seeing it in the context of objective meaning expressed in cul-

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turai forms and social institutions. Since consciousness is pre-formed within society, subjectivity is merely the phenomenal manifestation of individual psychology expressed within objective institutional arrangements. People think and act within social relations, cultural forms, and institutional structures which are excluded by these meth­ ods. Opinions statistically organize individual responses into a col­ lective which is already organized by the preexisting framework of the culture industry. Positivism “enchants that which is mediated into something immediate...[and] automatically encourages and tol­ erates only such knowledge of itself that slides off its back without any impact.”46 The social is turned into an empirical fact and in the process method abstracts from social structures and history and turns science into an articulation and defense of the status quo—it be­ comes an ideology. Positivism creates a method based on the values of objectivity and neutrality that distort the social object and repress social criticism. Adorno sees this relationship between the subject and object, empirical facts and social totality as a dialectical and societal tension between the particular and general. To understand only the subjective component and not the objective is to subvert the true meaning of consciousness and to replace the dialectic with static analytic categories of inductive logic, thereby reifying the re­ lation between the universal and particular. But how does one approach the social totality? If the empirical methods of social science are too formal and atomistic to uncover the objective structures lying beneath the surface, then how does one undertake a critical theory of society? Adorno views this as an important ontological and epistemological question on a par with traditional metaphysical questions of being, essence, and universal­ ity which have been part of Western philosophy since its beginnings in classical Greece. What status does the idea of “society” have as a sociological concept?47 Is it real; is it a crypto-metaphysical cat­ egory; or is it a conventionalist, linguistic construct? To access this question further, Adorno examines a key concept which appears in Marx’s Capital—the law of economic exchange. Unraveling the mysteries of this concept helps Adorno to clarify his understanding of the concept of social totality. Marx’s law of market exchange, borrowed from its various forms in Aristotle, Locke, and Ricardo, contends that, in capitalism, there is a dualism between the production of use values for immediate consumption and exchange values for sale and profit accumulation.

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The basis for market exchange lies in the equivalency of value con­ tained in each commodity. The discussion within Western thought has been on the foundation for the equivalency itself which Marx saw in the commodification and mechanization of labor, that is, the historical conditions of abstract labor. In capitalist societies all fac­ tors of production become saleable commodities, including human labor, and it is only the latter which is capable of producing surplus value or profit. With the coming of the homogeneity of the market and the workplace in the form of market equality and abstract labor, respectively, the reorganization of labor and the mechanization of work are designed to exploit the greatest amount of surplus produc­ tion from the workers over and above what is necessary for their survival. This is legitimated by the belief in the apparent fairness and justice of exchange relations in the market and the private own­ ership of the means of production. However, the actual result is that the more efficient and productive workers are, the more impover­ ished they become. This is because property and class power is so arranged that the working class does not participate in the distribu­ tion of capital or social wealth. Early stages of liberal competition within the market drives owners to introduce more sophisticated and higher concentrations of machinery and technology into production in order to lower prices, increase productivity, and become more competitive. This is what Marx called changes in the organic com­ position of capital. Transformations and competition within capital resulted in a greater split between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, growing class conflict and alienation of labor, commodification of human experience and needs, tendential fall in the rate of profit, economic concentration and centralization of capital in monopolies, increasing immiseration of the working class, and a structural crisis within the whole economic system. Adorno asks if this law is merely conceptual or immediately ob­ servable. What is the logical and ontological status of concept for­ mation and the rules of scientific inquiry in the social sciences? Adorno denies that the law of exchange can be observed, but, in spite of this, he contends that it is not just a conceptual schema, idealist fantasy, or product of the imagination, but is real and “im­ manent to reality.” It is the guiding principle, universal form, and objective reality that underlies the social organization of production and law of market exchange. By failing to investigate the structural realities of capitalism, classical economics and contemporary soci-

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ology are caught at the level of phenomenal illusions and psycho­ logical phenomena—general expectations and consciousness of consumers in opinion surveys. The pre-formation of consciousness, personality, and ideology lies in the unconscious social structures expressed in the law of exchange. The illusory phenomena and reified abstractions of science create a false objectivity. Science and poli­ tics again merge into one form held together by the commodification of human life—individuals, needs, and relationships become reified, and scientific objectivity, in turn, becomes an epistemological and marketable commodity. Horkheimer in Eclipse of Reason asks what are the effects of this development: “What are the consequences of the formalization of reason? Justice, equality, happiness, tolerance, all the concepts that, as mentioned, were in preceding centuries sup­ posed to be inherent in or sanctioned by reason, have lost their intel­ lectual roots.”48 Traditional objectivity is simply the scientific ex­ pression of the law of exchange—it is another form of false con­ sciousness and false needs (interests). Objectivity—as reification and false consciousness—is an illusion created by the scientific method itself falsely abstracted from the structural conditions that gave rise to it. But its methodological benefit is that it can never question the social system and thus remains silent in face of its deficiencies and contradictions. The concept of society as a systemic totality is analogous to an integrated system rather than a living organism. Adorno chose the notion of “system” over “organism” because of the epistemological implications of the latter idea. Capitalist society in itself and the law of exchange are not observable facts, but constitute the underlying conceptual order that pervades all aspects of social relationships. As Adorno admits, society is not a totality or form in the sense of an empirical object, but a complex series of interrelationships and struc­ tures which can only be seen theoretically. Only by means of an integration of empirical research and theoretical analysis can the re­ search achieve access to the social objectivity which arises out of the historical object itself and not forcibly imposed upon it by the rules and logic of its method. Adorno is aware that no amount of survey research into the subjective feelings and consciousness of workers, no amount of good will, personal satisfaction, or job secu­ rity is able to dispel the law of value and capitalist production.49 Subjective attitudes cannot replace class structures. Both the subjec­ tive and objective aspects of social science must be present to un-

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cover the social whole. “Empirical social research is not only a cor­ rective in that it prevents blindly superimposed constructions, but also in the relationship between appearance and essence.”50 A theory of the whole without the empirical is metaphysics, and the empirical without theory is blind and meaningless fact. The modern form of scientific objectivity is a conceptual iron cage which recognizes only reified and rationalized forms of reason and ideals as legitimate. As Robert Holub writes: “By this Adorno means that the (critical) theo­ rist must try to grasp the thing itself, human society, rather than col­ lecting the distorted reflections in the minds of individuals or apply­ ing a reified method that fetishizes facts.”51 The foundations of knowl­ edge and science from Hume and Kant to Popper rest in quite differ­ ent ways and to different degrees in subjectivity. With Adorno ob­ jectivity is a product of the nature of the object—social totality, struc­ tural contradictions, and class conflict. The heart of critical theory lies in its concept of the social whole and how it measures the distance between concept and object, pos­ sible and real—not the correspondence between the two, but the difference between the object and its publicly stated social ideals.52 The methodological dispute in Germany during the 1960s has been caught-up in the distinction between the imperatives for human dig­ nity and capitalist price. However, unstated beneath this discussion lies the question of the possibility of morality after the Holocaust, the possibility of social justice after Auschwitz. Just as Kant saw the foundation of epistemological critique in the relation between thought and perception, Adorno sees social critique as the relation between cultural values and structural possibilities or what he calls the “ob­ ject left to itself,” on the one hand, and the empirical reality, on the other. Values are not externally imposed upon the object but arise out of the object’s attempt at a legitimation of its authority. Sociol­ ogy examines the inner contradictions of society by contrasting “the concept of a liberal society as implying freedom and equality and, on the other hand...[with] the truth-content of these categories under liberalism—in view of the inequality of the social power which de­ termines the relations between people.”53 Contradiction is not a stage in the movement from ignorance to knowledge or an opportunity to revaluate the causal or predictive adequacy of one’s theory. Rather, it is the starting point of sociology and basis for an examination of the structural constitution of society; it is the distance between what a society is and what a society dreams.

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By undertaking this type of depth analysis of social structures and cultural values, Adorno is able to reintegrate sociology and phi­ losophy, science and ethics. Since society sets its own expectations, standards, and ideals, the critical method compares its claims of so­ cial ethics and justice to its actual institutional forms. “The just orga­ nization of society is incorporated in the emphatic concept of truth without being filled out as an image of the future.”54 When the insti­ tutions and structures undermine or negate their own social ideals, then these contradictions represent a demand for social change and a call for new social arrangements. Social critique is the basis for the sociological method since the political and economic values of lib­ eral democracy are contradictory to the actual institutions of capital­ ism. However, when positivism separates ethics from empirical real­ ity, philosophy from sociology, it avoids examining the social total­ ity, conceals the cultural values which underlie and legitimate the social system, and turns method into ideology. It also immunizes society from any social critique and further anesthetizes it from a reality of embarrassing social contradictions. Critical thought be­ comes domesticated and, in the process, reason is silenced further. Forms of Rationality and the Habermas-Albert Debate The methodological dispute of the early 1960s continued under the partisanship of Jürgen Habermas and Hans Albert who set out to build upon the Popper-Adorno discussions. Habermas begins by clarifying the notions of social totality and cognitive interests that form the heart of his theory of social science.55 He does this by distinguishing between system and totality, functionalism and dia­ lectics, and analytical and dialectical science. These two views of social science are further articulated and clarified by analyzing them within the framework of the following five distinctions and relation­ ships: theory and object, theory and experience, theory and history, science and practice, and value freedom of historical and theoretical science. Habermas argues that when the theoretical concepts of ana­ lytical science are related to empirical reality, they are found to be indifferent to the object, external and functional to experience, pre­ dictive of history, and technically utilizable in practice. In dialectical science, the concepts are expressive of the totality of the object, hermeneutically related to experience, interpretative of objective meaning in history, and reintegrative of theory and praxis, concepts and social problems.

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Habermas first examines the relationship between theory and object by probing the differences between critical rationalism and critical theory. He contends that both Popper and Adomo refer to society in terms of an integrated social whole. But their methods, concepts, and logic are quite different as Popper uses empirical-analytic, func­ tional, and systems concepts and Adomo uses dialectical categories. Popper sees the world as an integrated whole held together by em­ pirical and mathematical regularities of functional relationships de­ duced from hypothetical statements about society. Habermas sum­ marizes Popper’s view of hypothetical-deductive science as a form of positivism grounded in formal rules of logic, the empirical-analytic method, empirical regularities, and lawlike hypotheses produc­ ing predictions and technically useable knowledge for social con­ trol and rational administration. Habermas’s position on Popper be­ comes clear when he writes that “the indifference of the system in face of its area of application suddenly changes into a distortion of the object.”56 Formal rules of the analytical method are imposed on the empirical material to produce quantitative and functional rela­ tionships amenable to and adaptable to mathematical correlations. Objectivity is reducible to measurability. Analytical science is indifferent to the social object under investi­ gation and to the normative assumptions of its own utilitarian inter­ ests of producing a particular form of knowledge whose purpose is empirical regularities and social control. At this point Habermas re­ emphasizes Adorno’s key idea that the concept (Begriff) must de­ velop out of the phenomenal and social object (Sache) itself, rather than being arbitrarily imposed upon it by methodological con­ straints.57 This approach requires a dialectical theory of truth, not a correspondence theory based on a mirror reflection of the object in a concept. Following in the footsteps of Hegel, Adorno used the idea of “concept” as a tool to uncover the empirical contradictions within society, as well as its real possibilities and ideals.58 Dialecti­ cal social science contains two important elements: a structural analy­ sis of the social totality and a hermeneutics of the social lifeworld (Lebenswelt). The former examines the structural and historical fea­ tures of the object and the latter interprets its social significance and meaning. Structuralism and hermeneutics methodologically corre­ spond to the empirically real object and its own self-reflective con­ cepts of values, ideas, and meanings. Science investigates the struc­ tural foundations—integrated interrelationships and social arrange-

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ments underlying the immediate object of experience, along with its ideological functions—as these are formed over time within history. Habermas next turns to an examination of how the analytical and dialectical sciences deal with the second problem of theory and ex­ perience. Observations within hypothetical-deductive theories are intersubjectively valid only when they appear within controlled and external experimental conditions which are reproducible and permit testing and retesting. Only in this way are explanatory hypotheses deductively confirmed. Experience confirms theory through antici­ patory prognosis, not through the inductive accumulation of data. The older model of positivism is rejected in light of the criticism of induction found in Hume and Popper. They both reject empiricism, the dualism between subjectivity and objectivity, and the autonomy of facts. Both models assume an objectivity that makes the world accessible to experience. Popper, thus, rejects positivism at the epis­ temological level but inconsistently accepts it at the methodological level in order to validate theoretical constructs.59 It is interesting to note that this is very similar to a problem found in Weber’s method­ ological discussions. Habermas’s criticism is that facts are determined in advance by the nature of the hypothetical-deductive method and its testing procedures. The nature of facts, basic statements, empiri­ cal reality, objectivity, and scientific validity are hermeneutically preestablished and prejudiced as social norms through argumentation and consensus within the scientific community. “The rules that de­ termine the domain of possible objects have been constituted in ev­ eryday communicative experience, prior to any measurements.”60 This is what Habermas calls, following Kant, the “transcendental preconditions of possible knowledge.” The very objects that we see are unreflectively constituted through the theory and method of the empirical-analytic sciences, thereby denying the role of natural herme­ neutics. Experience, and the social facts produced by it, is turned into a behavioral concept with its variables of objective responses, motives, causes, and empirical regularities. It eliminates the need to consider consciousness, subjectively intended meaning, social norms, and the cultural contexts of meaning. Positivism and critical ratio­ nalism, by permitting a very narrow range of experiences, facts, and theories as legitimate, limit the types of issues and questions that social theorists can ask. Holub argues, “the insistence on testable hypotheses narrows unnecessarily the type of experience that can verify or falsify a given theory.”61 Intentional action is reduced to

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observable behavior. It is this meaning of the facts which is ignored by Popper and remains outside of his method of criticism and refu­ tation and creates an unbridgeable gap between interpretive and analytical sociology: I think that the area of the empirical is established in advance by means of theoretical assumptions concerning a certain structure, in combination with a certain type of testing conditions. Such things as experimentally established facts, upon which empirical scientific theories could founder, are only constituted in a prior context of the interpre­ tation of possible experience.62

Just as Hegel’s phenomenology and Freud’s psychoanalysis tran­ scended and incorporated Kant’s critique of pure reason in their theo­ ries on the development of historical/autobiographical self-conscious­ ness, so, too, with Habermas. He does not wish to reject the analyti­ cal method as appropriate for sociology. He only wants to give it a pragmatic foundation and place it within a broader context of other complementary methodologies and social questions. Knowledge produced by the analytical approach is hermeneutically pre-judged and relative to the methodology employed. Facts and procedures are not things-in-themselves but must be dialectically deconstructed to reveal hidden assumptions and social norms. In the end, what disturbs Habermas are two aspects of the positivist theory of knowl­ edge: First, repression lies at the foundation of positivism. The use of this particular and exclusive method eliminates many important sociological and historical questions from analysis which do not conform to the methodology of critical rationalism.63 Popper has narrowed the use of “critique” to a particular method of deductive prognosis, observational testing, and critical refutation, whereas Habermas uses “critique” as a metatheoretical procedure for the ex­ amination of the unconscious and repressed values found within the logic and method of empiricism and rationalism. Displaced also is the dialectical and phenomenological method seeking alternative claims to truth in the social sciences. Second, the technical informa­ tion produced by Popper’s approach limits itself to questions of the purposive rationality of means, efficient functioning, and rational adaptation and self-preservation of the industrial system. It is inca­ pable of raising historical, ethical, or political questions about the origins, justice, or need to transform the system itself. It is incapable of raising questions that might call the validity of the entire social system into question. It is because of the denial of these questions in its theory of validation and justification that repression of self-un-

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derstanding occurs.64 Popper’s view of objectivity leads to a silenc­ ing of reason. In his essay, “A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism,” Habermas criticizes rationalism for its inability to move beyond certain restric­ tive experiences and experimental testing and also for its unwilling­ ness to examine issues of “moral feelings, privations, and frustra­ tions, crises in the individual’s life history...” What at first appears to be a confusing addition to the methodological debate becomes clearer when we realize that Habermas is referring to personality formation, consciousness distortion, and the development of the modem psyche. The analytical tradition cannot ask questions about the hermeneuti­ cal foundation of social psychology or social structures. It does not know how to deal with the unconscious or with social repression, nor with the underlying structures of society which distort conscious­ ness and identity formation. Marx, Freud, Mead, and Weber disap­ pear as relevant classical sociological figures under the illusory cri­ tique of non-falsifiable historicism. And with them also disappear important types of social criticism necessary for self-enlightenment and rationality. “Questions concerning this realm of experience, be­ cause they cannot be answered by technically utilizable information, are not capable of explanation by empirical-analytical research.”65 Preju­ dicial exclusion, based on methodological monism or universal claims to truth by a particular method, restricts the range of issues to be dis­ cussed to issues of means and efficiency, represses important social problems and social action, and legitimates the adaptive strategy of the sociologist to the maintenance of the status quo. Weber’s structuralist analysis of the historical origins of rationalization and capitalism, Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation and the structural foundations of capitalism in the social organization of production, his theory of value and abstract labor, and immanent critique of liberalism and capital­ ism, and Freud’s theory of depth hermeneutics and psychoanalysis of the unconscious demand alternative methods and logics of in­ quiry than that offered by the hypothetical-deductive method. (These questions will be examined in more detail in the next chapter.) Though critical rationalism contends that it is capable of dealing with histori­ cal and hermeneutical issues, it does not show how this could be accomplished. One can only assume that just as the particular event is explained through a general law, history and culture lose their uniqueness and individuality because they are subsumed under and explained through a universal covering law.

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Habermas also argues that the epistemology underlying this method is sociologically underdeveloped and must be supplemented by a study of the pre-formation of the object in the social lifeworld. Objectivity presupposes a reification of social reality upon which hypotheses can be functionally applied. The functional interrela­ tion of social elements in a unified system is possible only under a prior alienation of society. This is what Habermas refers to as “ob­ jectivism.” The dogmatic imposition of externally tested concepts, universal laws, and technical cognitive interests distort both the object and experience. The positivist claim that its theories and concepts reflect reality are illusory and ideological. Positivism is pre-selective in that only those experiences related to the verifica­ tion of a theory with utilitarian cognitive interests of administra­ tive control and technical manipulation are relevant. A dialectical theory attempts to reintegrate the subjective, or social whole, with the objective experience. Throughout this essay Habermas takes Hume’s critique of induc­ tion and turns it against both empirical-analytic theories and nomi­ nalist categories. Just as the statements “the sun will rise tomorrow” or “all swans are white” cannot be inductively justified, so, too, for Habermas, the validity of a functionalist or systems theory of soci­ ety cannot be confirmed by the repeated testing of analytical sci­ ence. The particular is not categorized or subsumed under a hypo­ thetical totality of systematic observation and technical laws. The totality or inner mechanism of society is beyond immediate empiri­ cal confirmation. Like Adorno, Habermas writes: “The whole which preforms the tangible phenomena can never itself be reduced to particular experimental arrangements.”66 Dialectical science does not impose a series of operational and instrumental categories of an ana­ lytical hypothesis on the empirical, but hermeneutically and dialec­ tically permits the object to speak for itself. The third relationship of theory to history opens the discussion of science and method to include issues of the historical and social context. In positivism, history is not treated as a unique and particu­ lar experience, but is subsumed under natural laws of action in the same manner as nature. The same method, rules of logic, generaliz­ ing concept formation, and form of objectivity apply to both history and nature, thereby rendering the former invisible. History, as well as nature, is reduced to general laws, observable facts, rationaliza­ tion of means, and predictable occurrences; its whole logical struc-

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ture is one of relating cause to effects for the purpose of accurate prognosis, and effects to cause for the purpose of explanatory analy­ sis. The validity of analytical science lies in its predictions and causal explanations, in subsuming the particular under the universal: Sociology, with which we are primarily concerned here, is indifferent to history. It processes its data without regard to any specific context; the historical standing of the data is thus neutralized from the outset. For sociology, all history is made present, but not in the sense of a reflective appropriation of an irreversible and unrepeatable process. Rather, history is projected onto a screen of universal simultaneity and is thus robbed of its authentic spirit.67

As in the case of the neo-Kantian tradition, Habermas maintains that the historical sciences attempt to return the special meaning and hermeneutical dimension of human action in history. This dimen­ sion is then understood in terms of its concrete historical conditions and is, thus, inapplicable as a universal law of history. “Their [his­ torical sciences’] aim is not the derivation and corroboration of uni­ versal laws but the examination of individual events.”68 The differ­ ence between analytical and dialectical laws reflects the differences between the universal and the particular. By viewing history under generalizable and predictive laws, the real historical moment and its particularity are lost. If there are historical regularities, they must come out of the concrete details and movement of the object itself; they cannot be imposed upon it externally by the transcendental logic and method of the natural sciences. When this occurs history becomes another indistinguishable moment in an unchanging uni­ versal law. “We become aware, for instance, of the fact that empiri­ cal-analytical research produces technical utilizable knowledge, but not knowledge, which makes possible a hermeneutical elucidation of the self-understanding of acting subjects.”69 The hermeneutical basis of subjective experience is also lost as cultural meaning becomes just another hypothetical and functional quantity to be tested empirically. The real danger of positivism is that it “silences any binding reflection beyond the boundaries of the empirical-analytical (and formal) sciences...whole problem areas would have to be excluded from discussion and relinquished to irra­ tional attitudes.”70 A dialectical explanation, on the other hand, oc­ curs by understanding the subjective meaning the event has for its participants (method of Verstehen) and by relating the totality of par­ ticular causal and structural features to the actual object itself. The purpose of sociology is not to form universal laws of explanation

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but to understand the meaning of historical development unfettered by externally imposed logical rules and concepts. It is in the shared objective meaning of cultural values and social ideals that individu­ als become conscious of themselves and the purposes and goals of their actions. It is in this context that individual actions are under­ taken and give meaning to historical events. In this spirit Habermas maintains that “a dialectical theory of society proceeds hermeneuti­ cally.”71 Aware of Adorno’s critique of empirical research and opin­ ion surveys, Habermas moves beyond a subjective hermeneutics to a dialectical hermeneutics which compares the subjective conscious­ ness to the objective reality—contrasts the cultural concept to the structured object. This is what he means by “the objective context of meaning.” Objective meaning refers to the shared values and cul­ tural traditions of a society that have been used ideologically to le­ gitimate and hide the underlying mechanism of social reproduction and class power. By reifying this mechanism of class domination in hypostatized objects of analytical science, science has become just another ideological force within society. Its tools are objectivism and scientism. By returning to a Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, science inter­ prets and criticizes these traditions by “transforming] the concepts which it brings, as it were, from outside into those which the object has of itself, in what the object left to itself, seeks to be, and confront it with what it is.”72 By juxtaposing the political and social ideals of society, which had been used to conceal social reality, dialectical science wishes to portray society’s highest aspirations and contra­ dictions between its future hopes and present situation, its possibili­ ties and its reality. The “concept” (Begriff) reflects both the ideals and the tendential laws of historical development (law of exchange) thereby incorporating culture and social institutions. Habermas sees the necessity in applying the methods of hermeneutics, analytical science, and social critique in order to explain social reality, since all are helpful at gaining access to the various dimensions of the cul­ tural and institutional reality of modern industrial society. In this way, too, Habermas feels that the traditional separation of theory and history is transcended in dialectical science. Subjective mean­ ing is placed within historical and causally related structures to form the objective meaning of the whole, as dialectics incorporates the very methodologies which it formerly pursued with critical suspi­ cion. Culture, history, depth structures, and causal relationships are

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reintroduced into an integrated and holistic social science. Because dialectical science develops an objective understanding of mean­ ing, theory is no longer external to history. Dialectics transcends the dualism between theory and history. Ideological, ahistorical, and reified relationships are left behind as critical theory incorporates the prevailing and competing scientific forms of knowledge into a comprehensive dialectical science of society. The cognitive inter­ ests and technical value relevance of analytical science are com­ pared to the cognitive interests of dialectical science. Both are normatively oriented toward the future—technical mastery of adminis­ trative concerns and decisionism for the former and participatory politics and democracy for the latter. Habermas is aware that the unconscious epistemological imperatives of concept formation and methodology in analytical science must be replaced by a more open and publicly self-critical reflection on the nature and application of science and technology. The next pair of concerns is theory and practice. Analytical sci­ ence with its universal empirical laws, repeatable quantitative con­ ditions, and predictive ability is a technical mechanism with appli­ cation to social engineering, rational administrative planning, and general problem solving. It is just the sort of cognitive tool that a corporate economy and bureaucratic state need for their survival. Solving public policy problems, directing economic expansion, and controlling state expenditures require certain forms of technical ex­ pertise. Dialectical science, with its interest in understanding the values of the social lifeworld and explaining the structural and institutional foundations of historically specific social systems, interprets the meaning and causes of the social totality. In the analytical sciences, the social is treated as a natural entity subsumable under lawlike patterns of behavior in which culture and history lose their particu­ lar values and meaning. “History has no more meaning than nature but we can posit a meaning by virtue of arbitrary decision (D ezision).”73 Social techniques impose values from the outside based on the technical application of their hypotheses and laws. In the historical sciences, it is a non-reproducible and unique historical phenomenon which is central. This very uniqueness, which, as we saw with Windelband, Rickert, and Weber, forces sociology to seek alternative methods which attempt to examine the origins (history), meaning (hermeneutics), and structural configuration (empirical sci­ ence) of this uniqueness. By reintegrating the real and possible, in-

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stitutional analysis and ethics, dialectical science also provides a model for a different form of application, based not on techne but phronesis, not on technical planning but democratic politics. Like Horkheimer, Habermas views analytical science as applying values and norms which are arbitrary, closed, and authoritarian, whereas dialectical science applies only values of public discourse which have been democratically examined and legitimately discussed. In this way science is reintegrated with ethics, praxis, and the making of history. Values in the form of cognitive interests are either im­ posed by the unconscious logic and method of social science or by means of the self-conscious articulation of human needs in a discur­ sive community. The final relationship examined by Habermas revolves around the issue of value freedom in critical rationalism and critical theory. For him, it is an issue of the eclipse of reason. The central question is articulated as follows: it must be possible to decide whether dialectics, as positivism asserts, oversteps the boundaries of verifiable reflection and merely usurps the name of reason for an obscu­ rantism which is all the more dangerous: or whether, on the contrary, the codex of strict empirical sciences arbitrarily silences a more comprehensive rationalization, and con­ verts the strength of reflection, in the name of precise distinction and sturdy empiricism, into sanctions against thought itself.74

He is aware that this is a difficult undertaking whose burden of proof lies in an immanent critique of the rational limits of analytical sci­ ence. Habermas attempts to show that science is grounded in nor­ mative values; that it has specific cognitive interests; that it cannot be justified merely in experience; and, finally, that it is grounded in a practical consensus within the community. He also wants to por­ tray the social and historical foundations of empirical objectivity, cognitive interests, and scientific methodology as lying within the patterns and structure of work and pragmatic domination. One of the major tenets of science is the separation of knowledge and norms, cognition and evaluation, facts and decisions. Ethics, values, and social norms are beyond empirical verification and ra­ tional claims to scientific truth. Since they are beyond reason, are not grounded in the quantification of the empirical, do not rational­ ize means over ends, are not natural laws or causal hypotheses, and have no predictive capability, they have no cognitive validity. In­ stead, they are based on arbitrary decisions that can never be justi­ fied beyond the decision itself—nihilistic decisionism. By arranging

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the boundaries of truth and knowledge to a limited range of issues, reason becomes indifferent to ethics and silent about the possibili­ ties of social critique and change. As a process of rationalization, science itself becomes an ideology because it calls into question its own ability to analyze and criticize society and examine the rela­ tionship between objects and concepts, society and its claims to le­ gitimacy. By eliminating questions of the practical lifeworld and by focusing only on technical questions of problem solving and means testing, sociology is divorced from philosophy and reason is reduced to serving the prevalent class interests through social engineering and rational planning. Science with its reified objectivity, imposed methodology, and general laws becomes a function of preserving the iron cage from any critical self-reflection. The conclusion that Habermas draws from his analysis is that even the acceptance of experience and argumentation as the foundation of scientific knowl­ edge is an unexamined and arbitrary decision based on a “faith in reason.” But it is a certain type of reason that ultimately calls into question the distinction between science and ethics, objectivity and values. Critical rationalism is grounded in the pragmatism of instru­ mental rationality and the social engineering and political recon­ struction of the future by means of the “technical mastery over ob­ jectified processes.” Habermas continues the offensive against Popper and critical ra­ tionalism with an interesting analysis of the nature of universals. What is at stake is the issue of foundationalism. Following up on Popper’s own critique of induction and observation as the ground of scientific knowledge, Habermas rejects Popper’s theory of falsifica­ tion as just another attempt to salvage positivism from its own epis­ temological ashes. The central problem revolves around the meaning of propositions and the possibility of grounding or justify­ ing the truth of universal concepts. Popper had criticized the earlier empiricist claims to truth and showed how it was logically impos­ sible to confirm science except through the falsification of hypoth­ eses by means of experience. He also applied this criticism to proto­ col or basic statements about empirical observation. Habermas con­ tinues the critique of Popper by arguing that even rationalism falls victim to the difficulties of inductive logic. The sentence, “Here is a glass of water,” contains the general terms, “glass” and “water” that require some form of justification. Just as hypotheses need ground­ ing in experience, so, too, do these universals. Universals act as

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anticipations of empirical regularities and lawlike hypotheses about the world and, therefore, contain the same logical problems as found in the justification of scientific knowledge. They fall victim to the same logical difficulties of extended applicability found in empiri­ cism. Just as the sentence, “all swans are white,” requires knowl­ edge of all swans which is impossible, the concept of “glass” would also require knowledge of all possible applications of the category for an inductive verification of its truth claims to occur. Scientific hypotheses and universal concepts in basic statements about experi­ ence contain the same logical problem of foundationalism and veri­ fication. Habermas concludes that in the end universals can not be verified either through induction or deduction because both forms of logic are grounded in experience. Basic statements were to serve as the final justification of hypothetical theories, but since they share in the same logical difficulty they can neither be the foundation of science nor observation. They are not inductively traceable back to sensa­ tions and observations but are actually “the sum of behavioral hab­ its” and “anticipated behavioral regularity.”75 This means that there must be a consensus within the scientific community as to what con­ stitutes a basic statement about experience and whether an observa­ tional statement applies to experience. Habermas, following an ini­ tial lead from Popper, views this as analogous to the deliberation in a jury trial. Members of the jury and the scientific community must both decide what constitutes the facts or basic statements of the case. There is no other avenue of access to the empirical world. There is a dialectic between the legal rules of evidence and the formal proce­ dures of law, that is, a dialectic between what constitutes a legal fact and the particular facts of the case. And the particulars cannot be decided in abstraction from the universal principles because the lat­ ter guides the jury in what constitutes a legal fact. In order to apply the law one must know the facts and the facts are themselves a prod­ uct of the law. Theory, as the general rules of behavior, is necessary for the constitution of the particulars of experience. This leads Habermas to the conclusion that basic statements about experience are, in reality, statements grounded in a hermeneutically pre-under­ standing of social norms—the pragmatic acceptance of certain ob­ servations and facts as unproblematic and true. Truth claims are measured by norms grounded in socially defined forms of legal or scientific behavior. Universals are hypotheses accepted within the

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scientific and everyday communities as valid. There is no need to test continually whether all swans are white or all glass conforms to its universal concept. Again the distance and indifference between facts and norms, cognition and evaluation have broken down. “The empirical validity of basic statements is measured against a behav­ ioral expectation governed by social norms.”76 The justification of universals and basic statements presupposes prior social institutions consisting of intersubjectively shared cul­ tural values and social norms which delineate acceptable concepts and rules of scientific behavior. Though this life-context is presup­ posed by analytical science, it is not recognized within any philoso­ phy of science. Habermas goes one step further in his analysis by contending that these areas of hermeneutical pre-understanding have been developed from the rules and logic of the workplace. That is, the cognitive interest found in the Enlightenment and modern sci­ ence for precision and control is a reflection of the broader interests of capitalism toward class domination over the social relations of production. The mechanization of the social lifeworld is part of a more comprehensive restructuring of society along the lines of the logic of the workplace and the law of exchange. “The mechanics of Galileo and his contemporaries dissects nature with reference to a form of technical domination that had just been developed within the framework of the new mode of manufacture....To regard natural events mechanistically by analogy with labor processes in manufac­ turing concerns, meant focusing knowledge upon the need for tech­ nical rules.”77 Judgments as to what constitutes empirical evidence and facts are the result of consensual norms that have evolved out of the mechanical rules and deterministic logic of domination in the production process. Relying on the work of Franz Borkenau, Gunnar Myrdal, Weber, and Horkheimer, Habermas argues that the organi­ zational imperatives of work, manufacturing, and the utilitarian phys­ ics since the seventeenth century provide the social foundations for the formation of concepts and method in the social sciences, for the justification of the empirical validity of concepts and basic state­ ments, and for the confirmation of the theories themselves.78 Work and consciousness are transformed into productive forces for the domination of labor and nature whose sole purpose is the extraction of value and profits. But with the development of the Enlighten­ ment, the social consensus, utilitarian interests, and intersubjective norms are “no longer thematized, recede into the background...and

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subjectively disappear”—they “fall into oblivion.” Habermas inter­ prets this as a continuation of the classical Greek view of theory as contemplation abstracted from all practical interests and needs. In this process of rationalization, the methodological issue of value freedom expresses our alienated form of consciousness of this his­ torical development in which objects of exchange and science be­ come reified and hypostatized. Objects are abstracted from any con­ nection to labor and the cognitive interests of society. Over time the connection between the economic and cultural world is lost and sci­ ence takes on an unconscious, theoretical life of its own unconnected to any rules of technical domination. In this illusory distancing of itself from its own historical and social context, science becomes indifferent and neutral to the practical values of bourgeois society; it becomes methodologically objective and value free whose only purpose is the articulation of alternative means to preestablished ends. Ethical indifference creates a formal dogmatic science whose un­ derlying logic and structure are determined by the broader social forces of modernity. However, since science is separated from phi­ losophy by a particular hermeneutical pre-understanding, it no longer has the conceptual ability to reflect upon these issues. Having lost self-critical reason, it can only stand unprotected and silent before the immediacy and power of experience and the status quo. By sepa­ rating means from ends, facts from value, reason from ethics, sci­ ence mirrors the fragmentation and rationalization of human life pro­ duced within modern bourgeois society. Reason has been reduced to reproducing the efficient means and functional relations neces­ sary to accomplish ends that lie outside the reflective capacity of science. Shielded by the myth of objectivity and value freedom, sci­ ence is unable to recognize the practical values of its own cultural world and conceptual framework. It is an alienated form of con­ sciousness that produces technological wonders in the heart of ethi­ cal misery. It creates “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” These ideas will be developed in more detail with the publi­ cation of On the Logic o f the Social Sciences and The Theory o f Communicative Action, which will be examined in the next chapter. Critical Rationalism of Hans Albert Hans Albert, in defending Popper and critical rationalism, responds to Habermas in his essay, “The Myth of Total Reason.” Albert rejects Habermas’s analysis of analytical science and technical rationality,

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as well as his theory of dialectical reason and natural hermeneutics. He criticizes Habermas for introducing into the methodological dis­ pute a new form of dialectical obscurantism, Hegelian metaphysics, and idealist essentialism. Habermas has rejected Popper’s “positiv­ ism” because of its objectivism, indifference to application, distor­ tion of historical objects, interest in technical domination and ad­ ministrative control, instrumentalist and nomological interpretation of social science, and failure to appreciate the significance and mean­ ing of the hermeneutical social lifeworld that grounded the technical concepts and mechanical logic of analytical science. Albert calls into question, what he perceives to be, a whole series of errors in Habermas’s interpretation of Popper: the transformation of practical into technical reason, his view of value freedom and the rationaliza­ tion of science, his inability to distinguish between logical positiv­ ism and critical rationalism, and the narrowing of reason to techno­ logical positivism and nominalist decisionism. He also dismisses Habermas’s sociological and historical analysis of the origins of sci­ entific consciousness in the logic and organization of the workplace. Albert, as with Popper before him, takes a decidedly Kantian turn. He maintains that observation is theory driven and that the recon­ structions of issues of classical epistemology no longer proceed from empiricism or rationalism, but are based on the method of critique, revision, and public discussion.79 Issues of foundationalism and grounding are replaced by those of method, explanation, and test­ ability. As Albert says, Begründung is replaced by Erklärung.80 Kant’s transcendental philosophy of pure reason and constitution theory of truth are converted into a transcendental realism grounded in a criti­ cal method and social practice involving hypothetical laws and real descriptions of natural phenomena.81 With the conceptual advances in both physics and philosophy of science, with the development of non-Euclidean geometry and quantum physics, and with the rejec­ tion of the traditional notion of causality, the Kantian categories of the understanding had become inadequate. With the changes in the structuring principles of the mind, sensuous experiences have been altered. These developments have also forced a reconsideration of the epistemological notion of grounding (Wahrheitsgarantie) and the traditional relationship between truth and certainty. “In the area of the natural sciences Albert Einstein had drawn epistemological consequences, which were antithetical to the Kantian interpretation.” A result of these scientific changes is that “the last province of cer-

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tainty in human knowledge had disappeared”82 and with it the phi­ losophy of traditional rationalism. This, in turn, cleared the way for the transcendental realism and critical rationalism of Popper and Albert. Science becomes a never-ending search for truth but it can never achieve validation through certainty. Theoretical statements can only have the status of testable nomological hypotheses.83 Their truth is maintained through intersubjective examination. Albert is aware that his method goes beyond the Kantian theory of experi­ ence.84 To counter the criticisms of Habermas, Albert begins by focusing upon the nature of “experience” in the social sciences. This he hopes will bring the discussion back to a grounding in empirical reality and away from the abstractionism and confusions of German phi­ losophy which have dangerous methodological and political impli­ cations. Albert objects that Habermas uses terms such as dialectics, totality, history, social lifeworld, the object itself, etc. as analytical hammers by which to criticize Popper without ever defining their meanings or moving to a clarification of method in the social sci­ ences. By not being able to clarify sufficiently their terms, critical theorists render their metatheoretical ideas unintelligible and inad­ equate.85 Albert, following Popper, rejects empiricism and crude positivism.86 He remarks that the empirical sciences are method­ ologically more open because their theories can be publicly exam­ ined, closely scrutinized, and rejected, if necessary. They develop lawlike connections because they are closer to the actual structure of empirical reality and historical events; their technical ability to predict is a result of their connections to the facts. Thus, their meth­ odological openness to refutation, technical rationality, and predic­ tive capacity result from their ontological superiority. It is not the product of some unconscious cognitive interest in technical domi­ nation or an instrumental bias in truth claims which ultimately preju­ dice scientific inquiry. It is simply that the analytical sciences reflect reality better.87 Albert is truly perplexed by Habermas’s claim that when the cog­ nitive interest in domination moves beyond nature into a study of history, culture, and social institutions, it distorts the object of inves­ tigation. He dismisses the danger that Habermas sees when the so­ cial sciences appropriate the methodology of the natural sciences. Habermas is very suspicious of applying the hypothetical-deductive method of the natural sciences to the social sciences, thereby super-

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imposing a functionalist explanation of nature onto the study of his­ tory and society. He fears that the distinctive content and form of these sociological dimensions will be lost. Albert is nonplused by these criticisms and asks how can technical interests distort the ob­ ject and how would this change our understanding of theory. He also asks how dialectical sociology, with its nontestable, a priori cat­ egories, natural hermeneutics, holistic method, and return to the sig­ nificance of the object, improves upon the more empirically grounded analytical sciences. Here Albert is following closely Popper’s cri­ tique of Marxism, dialectics, and historicism in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and The Poverty of Historicism. Albert views dialectics as a magical wand being waved over these methodologi­ cal problems without offering any concrete evidence for their em­ pirical superiority. Metaphors replace method as the central topic of discussion. He dismisses critical theory as prejudicial, metaphysi­ cal, and conservative. The heart of the dispute between Albert and Habermas centers around the nature of experience. For Albert, experience in the ana­ lytical sciences is viewed as controlled observation within intersubjective, reproducible, and testable conditions, whereas, for Habermas, experience is seen as the social totality and pre-scientific meaning (natural hermeneutics) of the cultural lifeworld. Legitima­ tion of science is ultimately to be determined by sense experience, but dialectical and analytical science interpret its meaning differ­ ently. Though the former recognizes that theory must be related to experience, the social whole still remains outside of empirical test­ ability and confirmation. Opposed to this, Albert insists that testabil­ ity, fallibility, and open rational argument are the basis for his epis­ temological and methodological position.88 As in the case with Pop­ per, he rejects foundationalism, the myth of the given, and the au­ thoritarian structure of traditional theories of knowledge. The search for ultimate truths (realism), certitude, and the universal foundations of knowledge in the senses or reason is rejected in his Treatise on Critical Reason (1968). Albert refers to this search for secure foun­ dations or ultimate authority in self-evident truths of the intellectual intuitions of clear and distinct ideas or immediate experience as the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of justification. “Both versions of classical epistemology have in common the idea of an immediate access to truth through self-evident intellectual insight or careful observation.”89 The ocular metaphor of the passively given

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is rejected as an arbitrary and authoritarian imposition of external criteria of knowledge on human reason. Albert is critical of the tradi­ tional approaches of rationalism and empiricism because they both express the Munchhausen trilemma and are thereby guilty of infi­ nite regress, logical circularity, and arbitrary decisionism.90 Each attempt to ground knowledge in a universal haven is itself in need of justification; the justification process assumes as valid that which is in need of justification; and the final acceptance of the senses or reason as the basis of knowledge is ultimately arbitrary and authori­ tarian.91 Metaphysical dogmatism and supernatural revelation re­ place reasoned discourse and critical analysis. Albert rejects Habermas’s theory of subjective and objective mean­ ing, historical causality, social totality, the method of Verstehen, and dialectical reason. They are all forms of “dialectical obscuration.” He does not believe these areas can be translated into an empirical, sociological method. The concepts of the social whole and histori­ cal law are residual Hegelian categories that should play no part in empirical and historical research. Also Habermas does not examine the necessary technical questions of concept formation, logic, or method of cultural hermeneutics or critical sociology. He simply assumes their existence as true and then proceeds to attack Popper and critical rationalism. Albert criticizes the poverty of historicism that lies beneath Habermas’s theory of history because, in the end, “he is looking for an objective justification of practical action de­ rived from the meaning of history, a justification which a sociology with an empirical-scientific character cannot, by its nature, pro­ duce.”92 Albert accuses Habermas of establishing an elaborate so­ ciological and philosophical facade behind which hide arbitrary and metaphysical values. Behind objectivity and hermeneutics lurks a dialectical fetishism; behind the critique of ideology and objective meaning in history another metaphysics; behind public discourse and unrestrained communication lies Marxism; and behind values and interests lies the justification for political totalitarianism. Albert does not accept Habermas’s formulation of the value free­ dom problem, the existence of a pre-scientific, everyday world of social meaning, or the normative foundations of analytical science in technical domination. Instead he relies on Popper’s distinction between a logic of discovery and a logic of justification to reject Habermas’s theory of natural hermeneutics. The hermeneutical ori­ gins of hypotheses and theories are irrelevant to the process of le-

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gitimation and justification in experience. Albert also criticizes the model of jury deliberation used by Habermas to help clarify his theory of hermeneutics and pragmatism. The former attempts to show how the logical rules of procedure are distinct from the legal norms ap­ plicable in a particular case. The rules of application and the legal norms involve no circularity of argument. In the same way, the meth­ odology of science is quite distinct from the hermeneutical consen­ sus and scientific tradition that underlies empirical research. If this were not so, then no theory would be refutable.93 So long as theo­ ries can be intersubjectively tested under empirical conditions, their origins are not a serious consideration for the sociological method. The philosophical way out of the logical dilemma of the origins and foundations of objectivity in the senses or reason lies in the work of Hugo Dingier who separates certainty and truth by main­ taining that the infinite regress in epistemology may be solved by methodological decisionism.94 Dingier rejects the traditional view of certainty and absolute validity, and replaces it with the idea of permanent uncertainty in the pragmatic quest for truth. With the help of Dingier and Popper, Albert proceeds to reject the notions of foundationalism and classical rationality and replaces them with “the idea of critical examination, of critical discussion of all statements that come into question with the help of rational argument...”95 The never-ending search for truth, theoretical pluralism, the dialectic between trial and error, constructions and refutations, and the public testability and criticism of all conditional hypotheses and theories become the operative characteristics of objectivity. Rather than be­ ing defined in terms of independent and neutral objects of sensuous experience or intuitive reason (positivism), objectivity is now deter­ mined by means of scientific praxis and method. “What is impor­ tant, then, is not the origin of such theories but their efficiency and the possibility of testing them.”96 The postulate of value freedom allows the researcher to transcend the concerns of everyday life and concentrate on scientific research. And the sociology of knowledge that traces a historical connection between the mechanization of production and scientific rationaliza­ tion is rejected as a form of “positivism.” Problems of concept for­ mation and logic of method disappear as dialectics is transformed into positivism. Albert, as with Popper before him, admits that all research is normatively grounded in some values and cognitive in­ terests. However, he refuses to accept the idea that modern science

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has one main categorial imperative of technical domination and con­ trol. He does not explain why.97 Because theories are ultimately test­ able, whatever normative foundations there may be disappear as serious impediments to scientific inquiry. By relating facts to value, theory to practice, positivism to decisionism, and science to politics, Habermas was able to show how science is useful in the social planning and administration of the modem welfare state. With the rationalization of science and the irrationality of political decisionism, there is a danger that politics will degenerate into mythology and fascism. When scientific tmth is separated over and above all other forms of inferior and irrational knowledge, then questions of practical activity in the public sphere cannot reach the level of true knowledge. Instead, they degenerate into the desperate acceptance of a herd mentality by the mass of people without public discussion and critical self-reflection. Democ­ racy slips quietly into fascism. Albert, too, is concerned with the degeneration of science but claims that it is Habermas’s mythologi­ cal theory of dialectical science and its dubious connections to Marx­ ism that lead to an ideology of totalitarianism. “The demand for le­ gitimation which Habermas’s philosophy of history with practical intent inspires, makes respectable the recourse to dogmas which can only be obscured by dialectics.”98 In the name of dialectical reason and the critique of ideology, Habermas is unintentionally causing the very thing he is opposing—he is creating a new mythology which is instrumentally useful for the defense of totalitarian societies. This is not the liberation of consciousness from dogmatism that Habermas hopes for, but the insuring of the success of dogmatic and unreflective thinking through a “dialectical cult of total reason.” Albert ad­ mits to some of Habermas’s arguments, including the critique of scientism and positivism, the normative foundations of sociology, the plausibility of the interrelationship between positivism and decisionism, and, even to some extent, the instrumentalist interpre­ tation of science (prognosis and empirical testing). However, these do not advance the issue under consideration—the analysis of the logic of inquiry and method of scientific discovery. Habermas’s criti­ cism of crude positivism is accepted by Albert. He disagrees with Habermas as to its applicability to the work of Popper. Though criti­ cal rationalism produces knowledge that is practically useful, it does not mean that it has an a priori cognitive interest in technical control. And technological applicability does not insure that a theory will

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not fall to refutation. Critical rationalism provides an objective and scientific discussion of social and methodological problems that goes well beyond the ideology and obscurantism of dialectics and herme­ neutics. In his second response to Habermas, “Behind Positivism’s Back,” Albert again emphatically rejects Habermas’s claim of a residual positivism lying within Popper’s methodology, that is, foundationalism, significance of tradition, the separation of science and values and theory and facts, a correspondence theory of truth, and instrumentalism. He also rejects Habermas’s interpretation of the restricted experience of controlled observation and the need to ground science in a natural hermeneutics of pre-scientific meaning. Albert is at a loss to understand how this advances science; how it can replace the criticism and refutation of truth claims; and how it can validate theories by the facts of experience. He fears that critical theory is attempting a strategy of immunization and sterilization in order to isolate its own theories against critical self-reflection. This is the very thing Habermas accuses Popper of doing. Albert makes a strong point when he argues that Habermas has not developed the methodological implications of his critical philosophy of science. “One might well ask what are these [historical] regularities, what logical structure do the relevant statements and theories possess, and what methods of interpretation and legitimation are to be used here.”99 In an interesting reversal of accusations, Albert maintains that Popper has rejected instrumentalism, foundationalism, and positiv­ ism, but that it is Habermas’s pragmatism which contains some re­ sidual strains of these “isms.” This is what Albert means when he writes that Habermas has fallen “behind positivism’s back” and con­ taminates himself with analytical philosophy. By attacking critical rationalism for its failure to examine the social context of everyday life, Albert sees in Habermas a sociological attempt to reinvent posi­ tivism. “The dialectician becomes the real ‘positivist’ if he thinks that he can eliminate problems of the logic of research by reference to actual social phenomena.”100 Albert denies that Popper’s position is epistemologically prejudi­ cial and results in a restricted experience, narrow description, and dangerously technical scientific method. He also rejects the claim that the critical tradition from Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche disappears behind a narrow form of

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objectivity and validation. The result of this would be a restrictive interpretation of reason which limits the range of issues and ques­ tions that can be discussed and traditions that can be validly consid­ ered as part of the social sciences. Albert maintains that critique is non-dogmatic and that nothing is limited. “Neither theoretical nor historical investigations, of whatever form, are extinguished through the view attacked by Habermas.”101 All theories from existentialism and phenomenology to historical sociology have a legitimate right to a public voice. The simple restriction is that they must conform to empirical testing and public criticism. Habermas rejoins that meth­ odological and theoretical monism limit the range of discourse and rational argumentation to the limits of concept formation and meth­ ods which, in turn, screens out certain types of issues and sociologi­ cal questions. In response, Albert argues that this is not a limitation or imposition on experience or objectivity, it is just a necessary pro­ cedure for any scientific inquiry. Habermas distinguishes between inquiry and the analytic method. Albert does not and, therefore, accuses Habermas of attempting to immunize dialectical thought from public criticism and possible refu­ tation. Habermas is not concerned in this essay with the issue of public discussion, which he welcomes, but with the epistemological and methodological values implicit in Popper and Albert’s approach. For Habermas, critical rationalism with its rejection of empiricism and naive positivism still prejudices a form of fallibilistic positivism in its technical application of knowledge and in its theory of valida­ tion through prognosis, systematic experience, and controlled ob­ servation. Finally, Albert is critical and mistrustful of Habermas’s vagueness and innuendoes, his hiding behind an unarticulated dia­ lectic. From his perspective, Habermas offers no clarification of the different experiences and methods, their procedures and logic, or their applications. For him, the most fundamental questions of Habermas’s philosophy of science go unanswered. The methodological debate in Germany continued at the fifteenth German Sociological Congress held in Heidelberg in 1965. Its theme was “Max Weber and Sociology Today” and was attended by many of the most prominent German and American sociologists, includ­ ing Topitsch, Horkheimer, Habermas, Marcuse, von Wiese, Albert, Henrich, Mommsen, Aron, Bendix, and Parsons. This sociological meeting and the subsequent analysis of Weber became the occasion for the re-visitation of the Positivismusstreit.102 These issues will

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continue to play a central role in German metatheory well into the twenty-first century and especially in the full body of Habermas’s mature writings. Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6. r- oo

os 10.

11.

For a more comprehensive examination of the nature of analytic philosophy and positivism, see A. J. Ayer, ed. L o g ic a l P o sitiv ism (New York: The Free Press, 1959); Patrick Gardiner, T h eo ries o f H is to r y (New York: The Free Press, 1967); Abraham Kaplan, The C o n d u ct o f In qu iry: M e th o d o lo g y o f B e h a v io r S cien ce (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1964); J. Kockelmans, ed., P h ilo s o p h y o f S cien ce: The H is to r ic a l B a c k g ro u n d (New York: The Free Press, 1968); Max Wartofsky, C o n c e p tu a l F ou n dation s o f S c ien tific T hough t: A n In tro d u ctio n to the P h ilo s o p h y o f S cien ce (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Gerard Radnitzky, C o n te m ­ p o r a r y S c h o o ls o f M e ta sc ie n c e, vol. 1: A n g lo -S a x o n S c h o o ls o f M e ta sc ie n c e (New York: Humanities Press, 1970); Richard Bernstein, The R estru ctu rin g o f S o c ia l a n d P o litic a l T h eo ry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978) and B e ­ y o n d O b je ctivism a n d R ela tivism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); David Thomas, N a tu ra lism a n d S o c ia l S cien ce: A P o st-E m p iric ist P h ilo s o ­ p h y o f S o c ia l S cien ce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Andre Tudor, B eyo n d E m piricism : P h ilo so p h y o f S cien ce in S o c io lo g y (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). Karl Popper, “The Logic of the Social Sciences,” in The P o s itiv is t D isp u te in G e r ­ m an S o c io lo g y , trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976), p. 88, and “Die Logik der Sozialwissenschaften,” in D e r P o sitiv is m u sstr e it in d e r deu tsch en S o z io lo g ie (Darmstadt: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1972), p. 104. Karl Popper, The P o ve rty o f H isto ric ism (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964), p. 132. David Hume, A n E n q u iry C o n cern in g H u m an U n d e r sta n d in g , in The E m p ir ic ists (Garden City, NY: Dolphin Books, 1961), p. 332. Karl Popper, C o n jectu res a n d R efu ta tio n s: The G ro w th o f S cien tific K n o w le d g e (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 42. For an examination of Popper’s analysis of Hume and Kant and critique of the induction problem, see Albrecht Wellmer, M e th o d o lo g ie a ls E rken n tn isth eorie: Z u r W issen schaftsleh re K a rl R. P o p ­ p e r (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), pp. 31 -69. Quote from H. Reichenbach’s E rken n tn is in Karl Popper, The L o g ic o f S cien tific D is c o v e r y (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968), p. 28. Popper, The L o g ic o f S cien tific D is c o v e r y , p. 39. Popper, C o n je ctu res a n d R efu ta tio n s, pp. 16 and 136-65. Ibid., p. 352. In C o n jectu res a n d R efu tation s, Popper relates the simple example used in a course in Vienna when he began a lecture with the following question: “Take pencil and paper; carefully observe, and write down what you have observed.” The students responded by asking him what he wanted them to observe. Popper conclusion is that observation in and of itself is absurd, since it must be given direction through “needs and interests” (pp. 46-47). In The L o g ic o f S c ien tific D isc o v e ry , Popper writes, “observation is always o b se rv a tio n in lig h t o f th e o rie s ” (p. 59, note 1). Popper, C o n jectu res a n d R efu tation s, p. 29. There seems to be an initial compatibil­ ity between Popper’s metatheoretical distinction between a logic of inductive dis­ covery or the origins of a theory and a logic o f justification (deduction) or its

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

259

testability and refutability in The L o g ic o f S cien tific D isc o v e ry and Weber’s distinc­ tion between W ertbezieh u n g (value relevance) and W ertfreiheit (value freedom). In both cases the origins and discovery of a theory— the values and interests involved in its original creation— are irrelevant so long as the theory conforms to the method­ ological standards, rules, and conventions of the process of justification and the scientific method (p. 31). Weber and the critical rationalists both base scientific objectivity on the intersubjective testability of their concepts. Their main difference, however, is that the critical rationalists see the arena of testability in terms of positiv­ ist prediction and mastery over the material, whereas Weber views it in terms of his theory of objective possibility. Popper, C o n je ctu res a n d R e fu ta tio n s , p. 256. Karl Popper, O b jective K n o w led g e: A n E vo lu tio n a ry A p p ro a ch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 258-61. Popper, “The Logic of the Social Sciences,” p. 90, and D e r P o sitiv is m u sstr e it , p. 106. For a further discussion of these issues, see Robert Holub, Jü rgen H a b erm a s: C ritic in the P u b lic S p h ere (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 24-25. This method­ ological position of Popper undermines any attempt to establish the independence of the factual world from consciousness, science from the non-scientific world, and thus any attempt to distinguish between scientific and extra-scientific values. In The P o ve rty o f H isto ric ism , Popper accepts the unity of method between the natural and social sciences and is consciously following the ideas of August Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Carl Menger (pp. 130-31). See the critique of historicism and Marx in Popper, The P o ve rty o f H isto ric ism , pp. 49-51 and 71-73, and The O p en S o c ie ty a n d its E n em ies. Popper, “The Logic of the Social Sciences,” p. 95, and D e r P o sitiv is m u sstr e it , p.

112. 19. 20.

21.

Popper, The L o g ic o f S cien tific D isc o v e ry , p. 59. Wellmer, M e th o d o lo g ie a ls E rk en n tn isth eo rie, p. 93. Wellmer argues that Popper’s theory of truth is derived from the experimental model of the positivistic natural sciences (p. 89) and defines itself as a testing of the predictions of hypothetical constructs. His theory of experimentation, falsifiability, causality, and methodologi­ cal rules of science is grounded in instrumental rationality and technical engineering (pp. 14 and 94). Wellmer follows Habermas in contending that psychoanalysis and historical social theory provide alternative forms of “testing” the validity of empiri­ cal hypotheses than repeatable experimentation (pp. 107-08). See also Albrecht Wellmer, C ritic a l T h eory o f S o c iety , trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), p. 19, and K ritis c h e G e se lls c h a fts th e o r ie u n d P o sitivism u s (Frank­ furt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), pp. 17-18. Also see Jürgen Habermas’s critique of Popper and Hans Albert in T h eo ry a n d P ra c tic e , trans. John Viertel (B oston: B eacon Press, 1 9 7 3 ), pp. 2 7 6 -8 2 , and T h e o r i e u n d P r a x i s : S o z ia lp h ilo so p h is c h e S tu dien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), pp. 328-35; and his critique of Popper, Carl Hempel, and Emest Nagel in O n the L o g ic o f th e S o c ia l S cien ces, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry Stark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 25-36, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o z ia lw iss e n sc h a fte n : M a te ria lie n (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), pp. 103-16. Popper, C o n jectu res a n d R efu tation s, pp. 62-63,107-114,336-46 and The P o verty o f H isto ricism , pp. 120-59. In the chapter, “Three Views Concerning Human Knowl­ edge,” in C o n jectu res a n d R efu ta tio n s, Popper outlines the early modern history of philosophy as a debate between the essentialists and the instrumentalists. Those thinkers who defined science instrumentally, that is, as an instrument for prediction and utility, include Osiander, Cardinal Bellarmine, Berkeley, up to Mach, Duhem,

260

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Bohr, Heisenberg, Poincare, Wittgenstein, and Schlick. They rejected the essentialist argument of hidden essences and ultimate explanations of things. Popper argues that both essentialism and instrumentalism are obscurantist philosophies of science; science as they portray it cannot be refuted (p. 113). If a theory is an instrument, it cannot be true, and it is this very truth claim that he does not wish to lose (p. 104). Though Popper does accept the notion that the interest underlying objectivity is technical control and mastery of nature, he does not accept the ontological and nominalist claims of instrumentalism or conventionalism. Popper maintains that although theories are always interpretations of facts, they do describe the “structural properties of the world.” See The L o g ic o f S cien tific D is c o v e r y , pp. 59,108-09, and 422-24. Popper, The L o g ic o f S cien tific D is c o v e r y , p. 60, and The P o ve rty o f H is to r ic ism , pp. 122-23. Popper, The P o ve rty o f H isto ric ism , pp. 130-37. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., pp. 58-67. Popper, “The Logic of the Social Sciences,” p. 99, and D e r P o sitiv is m u sstr e it , p. 117. Popper, The L o g ic o f S cien tific D is c o v e r y , p. 59. Theodor Adorno, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” in The P o sitiv ist D isp u te in G erm a n S o c io lo g y , trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976), p. 71, and “Soziologie und empirische Forschung,” in D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 84. In his essay, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,” C ritic a l T heory: S e lec ted E ssa ys, trans. Matthew O’Connell et al. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), Max Horkheimer examines the theoretical implications of relativism and indifference in science and their relation to tolerance, democracy, and pacifism. “Modem relativism is actually the ideological capitulation of liberalism to the new autocratic systems. It is the admission of its own impotence, the transition to an authoritarian philosophy, which... constitutes the natural consequence of relativism... .Indifference to the idea in theory is the precursor of cynicism in practical life” (p. 165). Later on in the same essay, Horkheimer astutely remarks that “powerful economic forces welcome a philosophy that professes not to know what to make of these conceptions [contra­ dictions of the phenomenal world] and for that reason prefers to stick to facts” (p. 178). Objectivity is the given in a world of experience which is indifferent to the types of institutions studied or the technical use to which sociology is placed in maintaining order and harmony under repressive conditions. Theodor Adomo, “On the Logic of the Social Sciences,” in The P o sitivist D isp u te in G erm a n S o c io lo g y , p. 109, and “Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften,” in D e r P o sitiv is m u sstr e it, p. 130. Adomo also contends that in traditional sociology, the concept of “society” has no place because it could not yield technical and adminis­ trative knowledge but would reveal deep social fissures (p. 120, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 142). Ibid., p. 120, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 141. Garbis Kortian in M eta critiq u e: The P h ilo so p h ica l A rgu m en ts o f Jurgen H a b erm a s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 65. Adomo, “On the Logic of the Social Sciences,” p. 107, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 127. Ibid., p. 113, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 133. In his essay, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” Adomo says, “Theoretical reflections upon society as a whole cannot be completely realized by empirical findings... .Each particular view of soci­ ety as a whole necessarily transcends its scattered facts.” (p. 69, and D e r

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35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

261

P o sitivism u sstreit , p. 82). On the matter of the empirical inaccessibility of the social totality, see Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory,” in C ritic a l T heory: S e le c te d E s s a y s , trans. Matthew O ’Connell et al. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 192-93, and ‘Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” in K ritisc h e T h eorie: E in e D o k u m e n ta tio n , vol. 2, ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1968), pp. 141-42. For a further discussion about empirical access to “soci­ ety,” see Emile Dürkheim, The R u les o f S o c io lo g ic a l M e th o d , trans. Sarah Solovay and John Mueller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 80, and Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The M e th o d o lo g y o f the S o c ia l S c ie n c e s , trans. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 49-112, and “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in G e sa m m elte A u fsä tze zu r W issen sch a ftsleh re , ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1985), pp. 146-214. David Held, In tro d u ctio n to C ritic a l T heory: H o rk h eim er to H a b e r m a s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 175-99. See the essays by Horkheimer and Habermas on Weber’s theory of value freedom and objectivity in M ax W eb era n d S o cio lo g y T oday , ed. Otto Stammer, trans. Kathleen Morris (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971), pp. 51 -53 and 59-66. These essays on Weber were delivered at the 15th German Sociological Congress in Heidelberg to commemorate the centenary of his birth. Also see Max Horkheimer’s E c lip se o f R e a so n (New York: Continuum, 1974). In this work he outlines the formalization and instrumentalization o f reason from the Protestant Reformation through the development of nominalism, positivism, the Enlightenment, and utili­ tarianism (pp. 18-21). Harry Braverman, L a b o r a n d M o n o p o ly C a p ita l: The D e g ra d a tio n o f W ork in the T w en tieth C en tu ry (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 85-123. Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 196, and K ritis c h e T h e o rie , p. 145. See also Herbert Marcuse, O n e-D im e n sio n a l M an : S tu d ie s in the I d e o lo g y o f A d v a n c e d In d u stria l S o c ie ty (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968): “It is my purpose to demonstrate the in tern al instrumental character of this scientific rationality by virtue of which it is a p r io r i technology, and the a p r io r i of a specific technology— namely, technology as form of social control and domination” (pp. 157-58). William Leiss in The D o m in a tio n o f N a tu re (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974) traces the development of a sociological theory of science from Spengler and Scheler to Marcuse and con­ cludes: “According to this theory, modem science developed on the basis of inher­ ently operational concepts which were suitable a p r io r i for technological applica­ tion, and this is the feature that distinguishes it sharply from preceding concepts of science” (p. 103). Kortian in M e ta c r itiq u e writes: “The laws which regulate the circle of production and consumption increasingly define society in terms o f the domination of nature... .Within a system where science, technology, industry, and bureaucracy are tightly interwoven, the theoretical power o f a reason reduced to a simple cognitive faculty leaves no place for Enlightenment” (p. 56). Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in K a r l M a r x : E a rly W ritin g s , trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), pp. 159-64. Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 200, and K ritisch e T h eorie , p. 149. David Gordon, “Capitalism and the Roots of Urban Crisis,” in The F isc a l C risis o f A m eric a n C itie s, ed. Roger Alcaly and David Mermelstein (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), pp. 82-112. Adomo, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” p. 71, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit , p. 84.

262 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Ibid., p. 72, and D e r P o sitiv ism u s stre it, p. 86. Ibid., p. 74, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 88. Ibid., p. 84, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 99. Ibid., p. 76, and D e r P o sitiv ism u s streit, p. 90. Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, A s p e c ts o f S o c io lo g y , preface by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), pp. 16-36. Horkheimer, E c lip se o f R e a so n , p. 23. Robert Blauner, A lie n a tio n a n d F reedom : The F a cto ry W orker a n d H is In d u stry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Adorno, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” p. 84, and D e r P o sitivism u sstreit, p. 99. Holub, J ü rgen H a b erm a s: C ritic in the P u b lic S p h ere, p. 28. Adorno, “Sociology and Empirical Research,” p. 69, and D e r P o sitivism u sstreit, p. 82. Adorno, “On the Logic of the Social Sciences,” p. 115, and D e r P o sitivism u sstreit, p. 136. Ibid., p. 122, and D e r P o sitivism u s streit, p. 143. See Held, In tro d u ctio n to C ritic a l T h eo ry, pp. 183-87. Habermas’s connection to some of the key intellectual discussions of his time has been examined in George E. McCarthy, R om a n cin g A n tiq u ity: G erm an C ritiq u e o f the E n lig h ten m en t fro m W eber to H a b erm a s (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), pp. 243-83. Jürgen Habermas, “The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics,” in The P o si­ t i v i s t D i s p u t e in G e r m a n S o c i o l o g y , pp. 1 3 3 -3 4 , and “A n a ly tisch e Wissenschaftstheorie und Dialektik,” in D e r P o sitiv ism u s stre it, p. 158. For Theodor Adorno, N e g a tiv e D ia le c tic s, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), the only access to the structural reality o f capitalism is through a method which employs dialectics, concepts (B egriffe), and contradictions. “It is the matter, not the organizing drive of thought, that brings us to dialectics. Nor is dialectics a simple reality, for contradictoriness is a category of reflection, the cogi­ tative confrontation of concept and thing. To proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction once experienced in the thing, and against that contradiction. A contradiction in reality, it is a contradiction against reality” (pp. 144-45). For an analysis of Marx’s use of the dialectic, see Patrick Murray, M a rx 's T h eory o f S cien tific K n o w le d g e (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humani­ ties Press, 1988), p. 182. Ulrich Steinvorth, “Wertfreiheit der Wissenschaften bei Marx, Weber, und Adorno: Ein Nachtrag zum Methodenstreit zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Kritischem Rationalismus,” Z eitsc h rift f ü r A llg em ein e W issen sch aftsth eorie 9 (1978): 302-03. Jürgen Habermas, “A Positivistically Bisected Rationalism,” in The P o sitiv is t D is ­ p u te in G erm an S o c io lo g y , p. 203, and “Gegen einen positivistisch halbierten Rationalismus,” in D e r P o sitiv ism u s streit, p. 241. Habermas, On th e L o g ic o f th e S o c ia l S c ie n c e s, p. 102, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o zia lw issen sc h a ften , p. 200. Holub, J ü rg en H a b erm a s: C ritic in the P u b lic S p h ere, p. 42. There is a tautology here, since the standards of science define what are legitimate experiences and these experiences, in turn, justify science. In spite of Popper’s critique o f positivism, he retains many positivistic assumptions about knowledge, including the autonomy of experience in empirical testing, the independence of facts, the separation of subjec­ tive and objective, empirical testing as the basis for science, and a correspondence theory of truth between scientific statements and social reality. Popper’s discussion

Critical Rationalism and Critical Theory

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

263

of experience, testing, and facts relies too much on positivism and anything that falls outside its domain is repressed as non-scientific and illegitimate. But this contradicts Popper’s own arguments in favor of critical rationalism which do not rest on deduc­ tion and facts but on the basis of faith (p. 44). The social context and presupposi­ tions of knowledge must also be considered, as well as its hermeneutical foundation for a discussion about the constitution o f rationality and science. Habermas, “A P o sitiv istica lly B isected R ationalism ,” p. 205, and D e r P o sitiv is m u sstr e it , p. 243. Karl-Otto Apel, “The A p r io r i of Communication and the Foundation of the Hu­ manities,” M a n a n d W orld , no. 5 (February 1972): 10. Held, In tro d u ctio n to C ritic a l T h eory, pp. 303-07. Habermas, “A P o sitiv istica lly B isected R ationalism ,” p. 223, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 264. Habermas, “Analytical Theory o f Science and Dialectics,” p. 136, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 160. Habermas, O n th e L o g ic o f th e S o c ia l S c ie n c e s , p. 16, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o zia lw issen sc h a ften , p. 91. Habermas, “Analytical Theory o f Science and Dialectics,” p. 137, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 162. Habermas, “A P o sitiv istica lly B isected R ationalism ,” p. 221, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 261. Ibid., pp. 198-99, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, pp. 235-36. Habermas, “Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics,” p. 139, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 164. Ibid., p. 140, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 165. Ibid., p. 142, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, pp. 167-68. Ibid., p. 143, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 169. Ibid., p. 151, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 178. Ibid., p. 153, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 180. Ibid., p. 156, and D e r P o sitiv ism u sstreit, p. 184. Leiss, The D o m in a tio n o f Nature', Carolyn Merchant, The D e a th o f N ature: W omen , E c o lo g y a n d the S cien tific R evo lu tio n (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980 and R a d ic a l E co lo g y: The Search f o r a L iv a b le W orld (New York: Routledge, Chapman, & Hall, 1992); Morris Berman, The R een ch an tm en t o f the W orld (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Fritjof Capra, The T urn ing P oin t: S cien ce, S o c ie ty a n d the R isin g C u ltu re (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); and Kurt Hübner, C ritiq u e o f S cien tific R ea so n , trans. Paul Dixon and Hollis Dixon (Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Hans Albert, D ie W issen schaft u n d d ie F eh lbarkeit d e r Vernunft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1982), pp. 27-28 and 45-48, and K ritik d e r reinen E rken n tn isleh re: D a s E rken n tn isproblem in re a listisc h e r P ersp ek tive (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1987), pp. 30-32 and 38. Albert draws heavily upon the work of Malte Hossenfelder for his interpretation of Kant. See Malte Hossenfelder, “Kants Idee der Transzendentalphilosophie und ihr Missbrauch in Phänomenologie, Historik und Hermeneutik,” in B e iträ g e zu r K ritik d e r reinen V ern u n ft 1 7 8 1 - 1 9 8 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & C o., 1981) and K a n ts K o n s titu tio n sth e o rie u n d d ie tra n sze n d e n ta le D e d u k tio n , ed. Malte Hossenfelder (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1978). In M a rk tsoziologie un d E ntscheidungslogik: Ö kon om isch e P ro b lem e in so zio lo g isch e P erspektive (Neuwied am Rhein: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1967), Albert accepts Popper’s theory o f values and objectiv­ ity, as well as his distinction between a logic of epistemological origins and a logic of justification (objectivity of method) (p. 152).

264 80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Albert, K ritik d e r reinen E rk e n n tn isleh re , pp. 30-34. Albert makes the case in K ritik d e r rein en E rk en n tn isleh re that critical rationalism borrows the fundamental Kantian insight that it is the structure of the mind and the knowing subject that defines the form of empirical knowledge (pp. 32-33). Even though Albert rejects the a priori categories, the transcendental deduction, and the universal certitude in Kant, he maintains the central cognitive impulse of Kantian epistemology. In terms of the contribution of the structure of the mind, Albert replaces the Kantian K a teg o rie n le h re with explanatory laws and hypothetical theo­ ries. “For its [nature’s] explanation come regularities ( G e se tzm ä ssig k e ite n ) of all kinds into consideration, not only the Kantian principles of the understanding” (p. 33). Throughout this section of his work, Albert defends the realism inherent in this transcendental method. Albert, D ie W issen sch aft u n d d ie F eh lbarkeit, p. 48. Albert in his essay, “Theorien in den Sozialwissenschaften,” in T heorie un d R ealität: A u s g e w ä h lte A u fsä tze z u r W issen sch aftsleh re d e r S o z ia lw iss e n sc h a fte n , ed. Hans Albert (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1972), places Weber in this tradi­ tion with his attempt to integrate the methods of understanding (V erstehen) and explanation (E rkläru n g) into hypothetical-deductive sociological laws (p. 16). See also Albert, K ritik d e r reinen E rkenntnislehre, pp. 101-02,105,132-37 and “Theorie und Praxis: Max Weber und das Problem der Wertfreiheit und der Rationalität,” in W ertu rteilsstreit , ed. Hans Albert and EmstTopitsch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971). Albert, K ritik d e r reinen E rk en n tn isleh re , p. 31. This theme is again taken up in the section “Zur Kritik der ‘kritischen Wissenschaft’” in Albert, D ie W issenschaft un d d ie F eh lbarkeit d e r Vernunft , pp. 31 -36. Albert calls critical theory an “unsatisfying,” “inadequate” and “developing existential judg­ ment” (p. 33). In the same section, Albert sketches the origins of the transcendental hermeneutic in Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel from the works of Max Scheler, B ild u n g u n d W issen (1925) and D ie W issen sform en u n d d ie G e se llsch a ft (1926). He outlines Scheler’s argument of the three types of knowledge and their interests: the H errsc h a ftsw issen of the natural sciences, the B ild u n g sw isse n of the human sciences (zie le n d e n D isz ip lin e n ), and the H eils- o d e r E rlö su n g sw isse n of the reli­ gious thinkers. These are replaced in the works of Habermas and Apel by the technical (dom ination), interpretive (understanding and consensus), and emancipatory (freedom) interests. For an analysis and critique of the hermeneutical tradition, see “Hermeneutik und Realwissenschaft” in P lä d o y e r f ü r k ritisch en R a tio n a lis m u s (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1971), pp. 106-49, and T ra n szen d en ta le T räum ereien: K a rl-O tto A p e ls S p ra ch sp iele u n d sein h erm en eu tisch er G o tt (Ham­ burg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 1975). Albert, “Theorien in den Sozialwissenschaften,” p. 8. Albert, in K ritik d e r reinen E rken n tn isleh re, is concerned with the epistemological issue of the relationship between realism and conventionalism (instrumental fictions and orderly constructs) in R ea lw issen sch aften , rather than with instrumentalism per se (pp. 62-66). That is, he does not want to defend a naive form of instrumentalism and utility as the underlying reasons for concept formation in the natural sciences because it negates the cognitive and metaphysical content of the scientific categories. Realism and truth are no longer acceptable epistemological categories. Metaphysics, religion, and absolute certainty in the classical manner are no longer recognized goals. Nor is a metaphysics of the senses or reason possible. A purely instrumental­ ist view of knowledge leads to the conclusion that there is no cognitive or meaning­ ful content to scientific categories other than what is useful for the mastery of nature. According to Albert, concepts must refer to reality (R e a litä ts b e z u g ). The end of

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88.

89.

90.

91.

265

knowledge is rather the search for the V orh an den sein as “essence of things and the ground of appearances” through description and explanation o f the independent phenomena (p. 60). Albert defends a radical version of instrumentalism which integrates both realism and instrumentalism. Scientific categories have a meaningful content of observable facts, at the same time that they are instrumentally useful (pp. 63-64). In his work, D ie W issen sch aft u n d d ie F eh lb a rk eit d e r Vernunft , Albert treats the Kantian cognitive processes of perception and understanding, observation and theory as distinct (p. 21) which would correspond to his statements above on metaphysics and science. Again he wishes to salvage the idea of truth and realism from the remains of classical rationalism by developing his theory of critical realism as a “metaphysical doctrine.” It begins with a form of Kantian phenomenalism and builds upon it a theory of instrumentalism. It is an interesting deconstruction o f Kantian epistemology which is then connected to the tradition of Scheler and Heidegger. Finally, he describes the method of science as an art of technology formulated to problem solving ( P ro b le m lö su n g stä tig k e it ). Albert is aware that this view of science is similar to that of Kuhn and Wittgenstein (p. 26). In his introduc­ tory essay to the anthology T h e o rie u n d R e a litä t , entitled “Theorien in den Sozialwissenschaften,” he rejects the argument of the neo-Marxists and the Frank­ furt School that science, because o f its underlying instrumental and technical char­ acter, has been radically politicized. Albert doesn’t deny the instrumental value of science, he only rejects the exclusive emphasis on technology and the epistemologi­ cal conventionalism and arbitrary content of its concepts that this implies (pp. 2223). Albert is unwilling to surrender the notion o f truth to instrumental rationality. The relationship between metaphysics, hypothetical theories, and realism is revis­ ited in K ritik d e r rein en E rk e n n tn isleh re , pp. 37-38. For a further examination of these issues, see John Watkins, “A Critical Rationalist’s World-View,” in W ege d e r Vernunft: Festschrift zum sieb zig sten G eb u rtstag von H ans A lb ert, ed. Alfred Bohnen and Alan Musgrave (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1991), pp. 3143. Albert, P lä d o y e r j u r kritisch en R a tio n a lism u s, pp. 70-71, and D ie W issen sch aft u n d d ie F eh lbarkeit, pp. 66-69. This epistemological position clearly has political implications since all knowledge is provisional and fallible; there cannot be room for any universal claims to utopian certainty. Political knowledge permits only piece­ meal reform, not change based on the Platonic ideals of a “domination free, conflictless, harmonious social order.” The methodology of Popper and Albert sup­ port the open and free discussion permitted within a liberal, market society. Hans Albert, T reatise on C ritic a l R ea so n , trans. Mary Varney Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 32, and T raktat ü b e r k ritisch e Vernunft (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1975), p. 23. For an analysis of Weber’s theory of rationality and value neutrality, see pages 80-83 and 89-101. Also see Albert, P lä d o y e r fü r kritisch en R ation alism u s, pp. 19-24, D ie W issenschaft u n d d ie F ehlbarkeit d erV em u n ft, pp. 9-10 and 58-94, T ranszendentale T räum ereien, pp. 100-06, and K ritik d e r rein en E rk e n n tn isleh re , pp. 15-18. The traditional ap­ proaches in classical epistemology lead either to a faith in original sources through authoritarian dogmatism of the senses or reason ( G la u b e n s S ystem e ) or to radical skepticism. Albert searches for an alternative to each in the institutionalization of critical examination (kritisch en P rü fu n g). He fears that traditional epistemology immunizes certain forms of knowledge from critical review, thereby limiting the range of issues and questions to be asked. This can only lead to dogmatism and fanaticism. Albert, T reatise on C ritic a l R ea so n , pp. 18-21, and T raktat ü b e r kritisch e Vernunft, pp. 13-15.

266 92.

93.

94.

95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Hans Albert, “The Myth of Total Reason,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, p. 179, and “Der Mythos der totalen Vernunft,” in Der Positivismusstreit, p. 212. Hans Albert, “Behind Positivism’s Back,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp. 235-36, and “Im Rücken des Positivismus,” in Der Positivismusstreit, p. 278. Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason, pp. 41-44, and Traktat über kritische Vernunft, pp. 30-33. See Hugo Dingier, Der Zusammenbruch der Wissenschaft und der Primat der Philosophie (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1926) and Grundriss der methodischen Philosophie: Die Lösungen der philosophischen Hauptprobleme (Füssen: C. F. Winter, 1949). Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason, p. 46, and Traktat über kritische Vernunft, p. 35. Ibid., p. 61, and Traktat über kritische Vernunft, p. 47. This issue is developed in Karl Popper’s ‘Three Views Concerning Human Knowl­ edge,” in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth o f Scientific Knowledge (Lon­ don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 97-119. Albert, “The Myth of Total Reason,” p. 194, and Der Positivismusstreit, p. 229. Albert, “Behind Positivism’s Back,” p. 238, and Der Positivismus streit, p. 282. Ibid., p. 242, and Der Positivismus streit, p. 287. See also Treatise on Critical Reason, p. 76. Albert, “Behind Positivism’s Back,” p. 254, and Der Positivismusstreit, p. 300. Stammer, ed., Max Weber and Sociology Today.

5 Reintegrating Science and Ethics: Explanatory, Interpretive, and Emancipatory Sociology in Habermas The methodological disputes continue into the late twentieth cen­ tury. In 1963 and 1964 Habermas added his initial contributions to these discussions in Germany with his insightful essays on positiv­ ism and critical rationalism that later appeared in The Positivist Dis­ pute in German Sociology (1969). Over the years he produced more substantial works bearing on the topic of the logic and method of the social sciences with Theory and Practice (1963), Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1970), and The Theory o f Communicative Action (1981). These works further develop his critique of empirical-analytic science by expanding our understanding of the nature of interpretive and criti­ cal sociology. He pushes sociology beyond the empirical-analytic and behavioral sciences to an appreciation of the role of conscious­ ness and subjectivity in the creation of values and meaning (Sinn) along with the importance of social norms, cultural values, and po­ litical ideologies in the social lifeworld (Lebenswelt). The forms of experience, objectivity, and methodology in the his­ torical sciences are significantly different from those found in the explanatory sociology of positivism. Questions arise and issues de­ velop which are denied or repressed by the analytical tradition, which, for Habermas, ties the study of methodology and philosophy of sci­ ence to the politics and structures of late capitalist society. Clarifica­ tion of the dispute about the logic and rules of science is related to an explanation of the functional needs of society for a certain type of technical knowledge useable for maintaining its system stability 267

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and self-preservation, as well as its ideological authority and legiti­ mation. The connection between reason and politics is further de­ veloped in Habermas’s theory of the cognitive interests and norma­ tive foundations of science. In the tradition of determinate negation and Hegelian synthesis, Habermas attempts to pull together the cutting-edge elements of Continental philosophy and American pragmatism in order to build a metatheory of the social sciences. Rejecting empirical-analytic sci­ ence, which reduces social action to behavioral responses, under­ standing of meaning to the causal explanation of motivation, and history and culture to nomological laws, he turns to an analysis of the loss of meaning in science. Beginning with the critique of sub­ jectivity and pure reason in Kant and the dialectical phenomenol­ ogy of the Spirit in Hegel, Habermas moves beyond them to the linguistic analysis in Wittgenstein and Winch, the transcendental phenomenology of internal-time-consciousness in Husserl and Schütz, the hermeneutical experience and historically effected con­ sciousness in Gadamer, and the depth hermeneutics and theory of the unconscious in Freud. He rediscovers the epistemology and method of critique as the phenomenological reconstruction of the self-formative process of species development in history and as the self-reflection on the foundations of knowledge in subjective mean­ ing, culture, and ideology.1 To understand the conditions for knowl­ edge is to understand also the historical and anthropological consti­ tution of consciousness and objectivity within a social context. The goal of the critical method is to get behind the reification of the subject and object of experience in order to examine their linguistic, cultural, and historical origins. Habermas recognizes that a more complete methodology of critical sociology includes borrowing is­ sues of causal analysis and explanation from positivism; understand­ ing of subjective meaning and cultural traditions from hermeneu­ tics; distorted language, personality development, and narrative heal­ ing from psychoanalysis; and class and ideological repression from Marxian political economy. Though he recognizes the importance of post-analytic and postmodernist philosophy of science with its rejection of a privileged access to truth through rationalism and empiricism, he offers an alternative defense of the Enlightenment in terms of language, intersubjectivity, and public discourse. Habermas understands that these general methodological discus­ sions are part of a broader process of development within Western

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rationalization.2 Metatheory and methodological analysis of social science parallel closely these historical and institutional changes. The analysis of methods is not to be divorced from an analysis of the structures of industrial society; in fact, methodology emerges out of social theory and, thus, out of the object of modernity itself.3 Ideas of functionalism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism provide the critical foundation for social theory from which develop metatheoretical reflections on a philosophy of science. Social theory cannot be separated from the development of reason in methodol­ ogy and technology. According to Habermas, as we have already seen in chapter 4, positivism suppresses all other epistemological and methodological claims to scientific validity as a result of its claims to a universalism of method. In turn, it has a cognitive interest in maintaining society’s stability, promoting technical rationality, and organizing administrative planning. The “mutilated rationality” of positivism is the theoretical result of the structural needs of society as a whole. Emancipation from this iron cage requires an under­ standing of alternative values and methods that can interpret cul­ tural traditions, social norms, and political ideals, as well as delve into the underlying structures of false consciousness, distorted lan­ guage, and repressed dreams. Beginning with the critical theory of German idealism and mate­ rialism, Habermas slowly moves away from grounding sociology in a transcendental philosophy of science and subjective conscious­ ness. Rather, he seeks to establish its concept formation and logic of inquiry in social theory itself; rejecting the traditional emphasis on subjectivity, he begins with a theory of knowledge and quasi-transcendental interests, and then, finally, moves to a theory of language and a theory of intersubjective communicative action. With both these approaches there is an awareness of the connection between the ra­ tionalization of society and the rationalization of technical method; the distorted social rationality underlying modern institutions, cul­ tural values, and structures of power demand adjustments in our methodological thinking. In the nineteenth century, rationalization found expression in the form of the law of value, abstract labor, and the crisis of alienation and economic exploitation, while in the twen­ tieth century, it is manifest in the structural interrelationships be­ tween economic, political, and sociocultural subsystems (system integration) and in the crises of rationality, legitimation, and per­ sonal identity (social integration). Habermas’s social theory begins

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with Marx but is quickly supplemented by the writings of Weber, Horkheimer, Parsons, Mead, and Freud. The crisis has shifted from the realm of work to that of language and domination (authority and legitimation) and now expresses itself in the phenomenal form of systematically distorted communication in political ideology and personal neurosis.4 The potential crisis areas in modern society lie in economic production and the accumulation of capital, political steering, system stability, crisis avoidance, political legitimation, and the socialization of norms and personality adaptation. Because of the structural changes in advanced capitalist society, there is a need to reconfigure the methodology of the social sciences in order to get access to these types of issues. One reflectively backs into the area of methodology since it is precipitated by doing social theory. Oth­ erwise, philosophy of social science becomes abstracted from the praxis of sociology. Marx’s theory of capitalist value and commodity fetishism be­ comes a systems theory of political economy. Marx outlined the ra­ tionalization of the workplace, which now overtakes other subsystems of the state, communications, culture, and personality development. There is a growing need for further technical rationality in the social sciences in order to control the expanding and potentially unstable social subsystems. Following Weber, Habermas contends that the rationalization of society leads to the rationalization of reason and the displacement of forms of substantive rationality (religion, mo­ rality, politics, and the lifeworld).5 System disruptions within soci­ ety manifest themselves as economic, political, and cultural crises. In order to appreciate these complex organizational and structural changes in advanced industrial society, the methods of the social sciences must also evolve to where they can examine issues of the historical origins of liberal and advanced capitalism, the structural and functional transformations of the economy and state, and the continuing crisis of cultural legitimation, personality malformation, and ideological distortions.6 What initially began as a transcenden­ tal theory of reflection and idealist critique of epistemology turns into a critical social theory and metatheory of communicative ac­ tion. What originally began as a dualistic and neo-Kantian interpre­ tation of the natural and cultural sciences in the writings of Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert with a split between nature and culture turns into a dialectical critique of the normative foundations of sci­ ence in general and its connections to the development and struc-

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tures of modernity. As Habermas writes in the preface to Knowledge and Human Interests, “A radical critique of knowledge is possible only as social theory”7—as a critique of ideology and social struc­ tures. In the early stages of his intellectual development, this cri­ tique refers to the epistemological examination of the conditions of knowledge in a materialist and social context of shared linguistic practices and traditions, instrumental rationality and labor, and po­ litical domination. In his later work, The Theory of Communicative Action, a materialist social theory examines the nature of instrumental reason in the historical context of reification, rationalization, and un­ conscious repression. Habermas sees himself as completing the task of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud—integrating explanation and under­ standing, causality and meaning in the Geisteswissenschaften.8 German Idealism, Epistemology, and the Critique of Foundationalism Methodological issues alluded to in his earlier works begin to take center stage with the publication of Knowledge and Human Inter­ ests in the late 1960s. In more systematic and comprehensive fash­ ion, Habermas details the normative foundation of analytical sci­ ence in the technical values of social control and administrative plan­ ning. Rejecting the dualisms of fact and value, cognition and evalu­ ation, explanation and understanding, science and ethics, he exam­ ines the unconscious values which direct the various forms of social scientific inquiry—explanatory science with its technical values of control and domination, hermeneutical science with its goal of self­ understanding of cultural meaning and historical traditions, and emancipatory science moving toward self-enlightenment and social emancipation. Within the history of the philosophy of science, each form of science has at times conceptually excluded the others as legitimate sociological knowledge. Quoting from the work of Helmut Schelsky, Habermas writes, “It [positivism] denies that sociology has a connection with history that would extend to the dimension of methodology. There is simply no genuine access to history at all.”9 Habermas, on the other hand, sees relevance in the different meth­ ods and values of sociology and argues that each fulfills an essential theoretical purpose necessary for the development of a free and demo­ cratic community. The analysis of cognitive interests in science is directly related to the critique of epistemology and foundationalism.10 The thesis that the natural and social sciences contain hidden values

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and assumptions necessitates that Habermas rethink the nature of the concepts of objectivity and truth. With the rise of post-analytic philosophy of science in the 1960s, the verificationist and falsificationist theses of empiricism and ratio­ nalism fell under the critical eye of the American pragmatists. At the same time, Habermas, too, was calling into question the foundations of science, the infinite regress of epistemology, and the notion of a privileged access to truth. But he does it by radicalizing the implica­ tions inherent in the arguments of German Idealism. Kant had de­ veloped an epistemology which attempted to set the transcendental conditions for the possibility of knowledge through his critique of pure reason. He did this by examining the subjective conditions of knowledge in the structure of the human mind and categories of intuition and the understanding. But Hegel argues that this involved a fallacious form of reasoning, since Kant’s critical method assumed a first philosophy (Ursprungsphilosophie) in the a priori validity of mathematics and physics without ever attempting to justify them. Epistemology itself is making claims to knowledge in the very pro­ cess of justifying scientific knowledge. But what justifies epistemol­ ogy? Hegel sees this as a problem of infinite regress. One cannot validate a particular form of knowledge with a problematic claim to transcendental validity. According to Habermas, Hegel criticizes Kant for his normative concepts of science and the transcendental ego. Kant was a revolutionary, since after him “there can be no concept of knowledge that can be explicated independently of the subjective conditions of the objectivity of possible knowledge.”11 However, Hegel rejects the epistemology and subjectivity of Kant and adds a dialectical, social, and historical dimension to the critical method. Habermas uses Hegel’s phenomenology as a means of reinforcing the importance of the pragm atist critique of science and foundationalism, while also moving beyond postmodernist thought. That is, German Idealism provides him with the opportunity to re­ spond to the philosophy of science of Willard Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty and reestablish the fundamental direction and validity of the Enlightenment project. Hegel replaces the transcendental critique with a phenomenologi­ cal critique of the historical self-formative process of individual and species development in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The founda­ tions of knowledge no longer rest in the formal structure and unity of the Newtonian scientific mind but in a phenomenological reflec-

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tion on the history and culture of Western society; no one moment in time can represent the truth as it did for Kant. The analysis of the subjective conditions of knowledge is transformed into an analysis of the historical and dialectical conditions of intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. Hegel traces the historical development of selfconsciousness and the rise of freedom from the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Each historical epoch makes universal claims to truth which are then supplanted by the next cultural period. Habermas sees in Hegel a critique of episte­ mology and first philosophy. Neither objectivity nor subjectivity, experience nor consciousness can become the foundation of truth because they break down under the scrutiny of an immanent cri­ tique of claims to objective truth and universality. Habermas holds Hegel’s phenomenology as an early example of the critique of false consciousness and ideology. The method of critique thus traces the evolution of modem selfconsciousness from the ancients to the moderns. Kant had frozen a particular moment in the development of conscious life, reified it, and hypostatized it as absolute truth, that is, Newtonian science. Hegel thinks that introduced too many presuppositions and assumptions into the epistemological argument and attributed to mechanical phys­ ics a false sense of objectivity and truth. Positivism has committed the same logical error by transforming the critique of knowledge into a universal philosophy of science which already assumes the validity of a certain kind of scientific knowledge and method. Posi­ tivism is turned into a dogmatic and arbitrary belief based on the repression of phenomenological experience. Both Kantian episte­ mology and positivism had to be shown to be historical moments in the development toward self-conscious reason. Because Hegelian phenomenology attempts to reconstruct immanently the history of consciousness in order to “recover the forgotten experience of re­ flection,”12 Habermas thinks that this is the best starting point for the advancement of a critical method. Beginning with a radical skepti­ cism and critique of epistemology, there are no longer any a priori foundations to knowledge through sense perception or ideas. Epis­ temology can no longer privilege any form of knowledge as true. The dividing line between Continental philosophy and American pragmatism is fading. Since nothing can be assumed as valid, Hegel begins with sense certainty, the most immediate form of knowledge available, and

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slowly and painstakingly moves to higher and more concrete forms of conscious experience in perception and understanding. From this starting point in consciousness, he moves into intersubjective con­ sciousness and the Objective Spirit of cultural knowledge tracing the development of modem consciousness in the ethical order, En­ lightenment, Kantian morality, and the French Revolution. This dialectical reconstruction of reflection proceeds immanently through determinate negation. That is, at each stage in the development of self-consciousness claims to universal truth are made that upon fur­ ther reflection are shown to be false and thus necessitate a reconsid­ eration of the meaning of scientific, moral, and cultural truths. By unveiling the normative foundations of objectivity and sci­ ence, Hegel thinks he has dissolved all forms of false conscious­ ness, especially the distinctions between pure and practical reason, knowing and willing, science and ethics. The reflective subject can­ not be presupposed by transcendental logic but only emerges within the history of its own self-formative development. Along with the objectivism and naturalism of science, the dialectic undermines all dogmatic claims to truth found in positivism. Claims to universality and objectivity are part of the historical process of subjective devel­ opment which must self-reflectively reclaim repressed moments in the development of its own forms of consciousness.13 Science and truth cannot be logically grounded but are products of the reification of social norms and activities—theory is directly related to praxis. Thus Habermas writes, “Hegel radicalizes the approach of the cri­ tique of knowledge by subjecting its presuppositions to self-criti­ cism.”14 But Habermas is also aware that Hegel’s dialectical method is undermined by his own philosophy of identity and belief in the absolute knowledge of art, religion, and philosophy. Rather than radicalizing the critical method, Hegel ultimately makes it “super­ fluous” and falls victim to a “fatal misunderstanding” which will later characterize much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century methodological debates. The first stage in the modem development of methodological con­ sciousness is complete. By recognizing the hidden values that lie at the heart of modern science, Hegel has forced those who followed him into asking questions about the nature of science that cannot claim epistemological immunity from critical reflection. Unexamined assumptions and transcendental presuppositions are inadequate, given the radical skepticism that underlies the phenomenological

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experience. Marx completes the next stage of this process in his Paris Manuscripts o f 1844 by rejecting Hegel’s idealist theory of absolute knowledge and the identity of consciousness and nature. By placing consciousness and science within history and the social institutions of liberal capitalism, he completes the initial stages of the movement of knowledge from epistemology and foundationalism to a sociology of knowledge and social theory. He turns phenom­ enology into a critical and historical science. Social Construction of Kantian Epistemology Habermas argues that Marx begins to develop a materialist epis­ temology in his early writings by replacing Kant’s critique of pure reason with a critique of political economy. Instead of the transcen­ dental subjectivity and synthetic unity of the imagination, Marx in­ troduces labor as the mechanism for explaining the constitutive process of objectivity, that is, formation of objects of experience. Materialism, by replacing the mind with work, also replaces sensa­ tion, categories of the understanding, and imagination which medi­ ate between consciousness and nature with the materials of labor, productive forces, and the labor force. Empirical reality and objec­ tive nature are created not by means of a transcendental conscious­ ness, absolute ego, or absolute mind, but through the historical forms of social labor—praxis. Objectivity is formed in both the labor and cognitive process with the former taking categorial priority. The objects of experience are preformed as objects of labor. “Synthesis no longer appears as an activity of thought but as one of material production.”15 Thus Marx’s theory of praxis is, in effect, a transcen­ dental social theory of knowledge. “That is why labor, or work, is not only a fundamental category of human existence but also an epistemological category. The system of objective activities creates the factual conditions for the possible reproduction of social life and at the same time the transcendental conditions for the possible ob­ jectivity of the objects of experience.”16 Work is instrumental in reproducing the species life of the com­ munity, the social lifeworld, and consciousness of that world. In the very act of sustaining human life and creating the human commu­ nity, praxis mediates between nature and humanity and helps to forge the forms and categories of the human mind. Praxis is defined by Marx as not just work but as the social forms of work, the techno­ logical forces of production, and the social relations of production.

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The faculty of synthetic unity or the identity of consciousness over time—the Cartesian ego or Kantian subject—which holds represen­ tations together and integrates them into a coherent temporal whole, is not the result of the imagination of the transcendental subject but the categories of technical control in economic production. Thus, the method of critique moves into an analysis of technical rational­ ity—the logic, structure, and categories of political economy—and away from formal logic and critique of pure reason. The objects of experience, the synthetic unity of consciousness and nature, form and matter, are produced by the subject within the logic and struc­ ture of the technical rules and social relations of industrial produc­ tion. In very Heideggerian language, Habermas interprets work as disclosing the historical horizons and appearance of nature. “The forms are categories not primarily of the understanding but of ob­ jective activity; and the unity of objectivity of possible objects of experience is formed not in transcendental consciousness but in the behavioral system of instrumental action. Nevertheless, the matter that is given is first shaped in the labor process as in the cognitive process.”17 Our awareness of nature, our consciousness of reality, and our apprehension of knowledge are filtered through the histori­ cal and societal categories of classical political economy. Humanity’s relation to the environment is mediated by the cat­ egories of social practice and technical manipulation articulated in the natural and social sciences. The latter express in conceptual form the interests and practical imperatives of capitalist domination of nature and society; they express the institution of the productive forces and the pragmatic values of technical rationality and instru­ mental action. Habermas is following Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in seeing a relationship between theoretical and practical rea­ son and recognizing that self-consciousness is first achieved through theoretical labor. Since the rules and categories of reason are grounded in the practical values of social action and the productive forces, expe­ rience, objectivity, and science are ultimately based on the structures of social norms and action. The philosophical foundation of positivism based on neutral facts and objective truth is denied. Knowledge corre­ sponds to particular human interests and values that are manifested in the historical forms of rationalization of Western society. According to Habermas, Marx’s theory of knowledge assumes that “the organization of experience and the objectivity of knowledge become possible from the standpoint of the technical controllability of nature.”18

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Habermas contends that this critical epistemology is only implicit in Marx and was never really developed. However, the potential exists for a critical method in which epistemology is transcended in social theory. The central elements of an idealist theory of knowl­ edge are incorporated into a sociological critique of knowledge which is structured around labor, language, and social interaction.19 For Habermas, Marx did not go far enough toward the establishment of a critical social theory based on social practice; nor did he develop a theory of phenomenological self-reflection on the self-formative process of the human species and its relation to instrumental labor. According to Thomas McCarthy: “There is a basic unresolved ten­ sion in Marx between the reductivism and scientism of his theoreti­ cal self-understanding and the dialectical character of his concrete social inquiry.”20 That is, he did not incorporate a critical reflection on the predetermined structures of the lifeworld and objectivity; nor did he understand the nature of values and human interests underly­ ing claims to rationality and science; finally, Marx did not investi­ gate the social forms of domination and legitimation upon which economic power rests. The self-formative process in Marx’s theory was, according to Habermas, reduced to questions of production.21 He did not develop a materialism that included a phenomenological experience of reflection, which is a self-reflection on the historical development of the forms of consciousness and social institutions that maintain economic and political power within capitalism—a critique of ideology. Issues of socialization and personality de­ velopment, cultural values and political legitimation, unconscious repression and social institutions would have to wait for later social theorists. Instead, according to Habermas, he limited his theoretical statements about the development of humanity to the technical issues of labor and the productive forces. This restric­ tion of his theory to instrumental labor and technical rationality lim­ ited his ability to create a social critique of the cultural forms of ideology and domination, along with a social psychology of the pro­ cess of social control and distorted ego development. History was to be understood in terms of the development of the technological fea­ tures of the mode of production, not in terms of the growing selfawareness and self-consciousness of alienation and exploitation. Change and praxis were to be accomplished through internal struc­ tural fissures and technological crises and not through conscious reflection.

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Habermas argues that humanity reproduces itself both biologi­ cally through adaptation and culturally through personality devel­ opment and socialization. His interpretation of Marx is that he un­ fortunately restricted himself to issues of production and adaptation at the expense of a critique of culture and ideology. “Marx reduces the process of reflection to the level of instrumental action” and as a result does not “prevent the positivist atrophy of epistemology.”22 Reflexionswissen is transformed into Produktionswissen. Social sci­ ence, thus, lacked the critical element characteristic of Hegel’s Phe­ nomenology of Spirit with its phenomenological and dialectical analy­ sis of the self-constitution of humanity through stages of conscious reflection. Knowledge and methodology became pragmatic forms analogous to the natural sciences that explain and predict the struc­ tural and technological features of society and steer society through periods of social crises and institutional change. But Marxian social theory offers no sociology of knowledge in which technical science is placed within an understanding of the broader processes of social change. Knowledge for industrial production and capital accumula­ tion, economic stability, social control, and administrative planning was never examined within the framework of rationalization and the cognitive needs of capitalism. Epistemology dissolved into a crude pragmatism behind the development of an idealist theory of knowl­ edge and consciousness. With the advance of positivism, epistemol­ ogy lost its self-reflective capacity as knowledge became reified in the form of universal science. Its epistemological and sociological roots were split-off from critical reflection and social analysis; its epistemology and social theory were repressed into a methodologi­ cal unconscious. Garbis Kortian has succinctly observed: “Positiv­ ism is therefore the end of epistemology.”23 According to Habermas, the missing strands of social critique that go beyond work and instrumental activity already existed in Marx’s empirical writings which emphasized social institutions, class, and the social relations of production. However, they never become im­ portant features in his overall social theory. These aspects of his theory were reconfigured in Habermas’s own theory of social prac­ tice to include interaction, language, and communicative action. In order to develop this side of social practice, Habermas adds to Marx the ideas of subjectively intended meaning, objective meaning, cul­ tural lifeworld, symbolic interaction, language distortion, and un­ conscious repression—the ideas of Weber, Dilthey, Husserl, Schütz,

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Gadamer, Mead, and Freud. But Marx had already pushed episte­ mology beyond the limits of philosophical idealism into a material­ ist social theory of rationalization and capitalism. From social theory would come a sociological theory of knowledge based on instru­ mental activity and system maintenance; a new theory of social prac­ tice and the self-generation of the human species through work and interaction; an epistemology of cognitive interests and the norma­ tive foundations of science; and, finally, from it would come a metacritique of the social sciences that would integrate explanatory, interpretive, and emancipatory science into a comprehensive criti­ cal science. Rationalization of Domination and the Repression of Methods Habermas connects the rationalization of science and society to the rationalization of the methodological dispute. The development of modem capitalist society has produced stmctural needs for a cer­ tain type of knowledge which aids in the reproduction of the social system.24 This process has resulted in the disenchantment of the social lifeworld, the extension of specialized knowledge, technical control, and administrative bureaucracy over the economic, social, and cultural subsystems, and the reduction of substantive rationality to formal nominalist rationality.25 Science and technological ratio­ nality are extended to a broader range of social institutions and be­ come the criteria for the determination of reason and legitimation. Scientific knowledge and decision making are defined in terms of the efficiency and application of technical means over ends. This is what Habermas refers to as purposive-rational action. The ends re­ main irrational and are incapable of scientific inquiry. Democracy and social justice become just another set of standards within a nominalist market of competing values. In the end, the ultimate basis for political legitimation is derived from an unlimited and unregulated expansion of economic activity and capital accumulation. All other values are part of the consumer diversity and normative pluralism of modernity. “The depoliticization of the mass of the population and the decline of the public realm as a political institution are components of a system of domination that tends to exclude practical questions from public dis­ cussion. The bureaucratized exercise of power has its counterpart in a public realm confined to spectacles and acclamation.”26 Both Herbert Marcuse and Habermas have expanded upon Nietzsche’s and Weber’s theories in order to advance a critical per-

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spective of this process of rationalization.27 Science enhances domi­ nation over nature and humanity, as bureaucratic rationality takes over the direction of economic and political activity. Efficiency, pro­ ductivity, profit, and system stability become increasingly the un­ derlying values that motivate the social system and define human reason. At the same time, science legitimates modem industrial soci­ ety by determining the range of correct choices of action and strate­ gies in these areas. Following Marcuse, Habermas views this form of rationalization as unrecognized bureaucratic domination and po­ litical power. The expansion of the productive forces and rational organization of labor become the new bases for social legitimation. Society is rational to the extent that it produces knowledge capable of maintaining political stability and economic expansion. The dis­ putes within the academy over concept formation and the logic of social science reflect the broader concerns of society for technically useable knowledge. Epistemological and methodological disputes are displaced and exiled from the philosophy of science. And just as the interests and ideals of society are lost to critical reflection, so, too, the methodology of the social sciences has been repressed to where positivism defines itself as the exclusive representative of sci­ ence and reason and resists all other alternative methods of social inquiry as irrational and meaningless, that is, as non-verifiable and non-scientific. Because instrumental rationality has become synonymous with reason itself, “the political character [of science] becomes unrecog­ nizable,” since it “removes the total social framework of interests in which strategies are chosen, technologies applied, and systems es­ tablished from the scope of reflection and rational reconstruction.”28 To explain this social process, Habermas uses the Freudian ideas of suppressed emotions, dissociated symbols, and distorted communi­ cation. In nineteenth-century liberalism, society was able to legiti­ mate itself by referring to the political ideals of utilitarian equality, freedom, and social justice. These were the goals toward which so­ ciety moved and the standards by which it was to be judged. Capi­ talism was to be evaluated by the ideals of political liberalism. Marx had applied the dialectical logic and method of immanent critique in order to show how the ideals of liberalism could not be realized within the structures of capitalism, thereby placing the legitimation of the whole system in question. Ideology was useful in hiding the social reality from critical view and constraining real substantive

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criticisms and demands for social change. But it was always a double­ edge sword in that these same ideals could be critically applied against the system itself. The ideals could always be juxtaposed and com­ pared to the social reality and the result was not always supportive or encouraging. They could reveal the internal contradictions of the social totality. With the development of advanced capitalism in the twentieth century, this problem has been eliminated by replacing cultural values with technological rationality. Ideology no longer conceals but displaces and supplants. The human need and motivation for freedom and participation which originally drove these ideals are suppressed; the language which articulated them is dissociated from social reality; and the political ideals are excommunicated from their economic concepts and repressed into a social unconscious. These ideals are redefined in terms of market rationality, individual choices, and consumer free­ doms. The substantive meaning of effective symbols has been lost and replaced by formal categories of purposive-rational action. Po­ litical ideals and social dreams lose their public voice and political substance. The normative content has been split-off from its effec­ tive symbols. From the ethics of Greek political philosophy, medi­ eval natural law, and modem natural rights, the idealized content of social values has been depleted by a new instrumental rationality which does not permit reflection on the moral self-constitution of the human species.29 The social relations of production, class struc­ ture, economic exploitation, and hopes for the future disappear as bases for analysis and social critique. Science has become an ideol­ ogy which replaces the older political and cultural ideals of the nine­ teenth century with the cognitive interests of technical control and productive rationality. In the process, the ethical and political foun­ dations of capitalism are rationalized, displaced, and repressed. This makes it more difficult to reflect upon values and ideology as forms of false or distorted consciousness that legitimate the social system. These transformations have forced Habermas to move from Marx and Weber to Freud. Habermas offers two examples of this type of repressed thought— Marx’s theory of value and commodity fetishism and Weber’s theory of plebiscitary democracy and political rationalization. Marx had argued that the market economy produced a commodification of exchange so that market relationships appeared as lawlike relation­ ships between things and not persons. Capitalism created a market

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economy in which commodities or values for use and exchange were produced. His central insight was to examine this new system of production based on exchange value, a class structure of the private ownership of the means of production, and the private appropria­ tion of surplus value legitimated through civil law. His goal was to unveil the underlying structures of class domination and exploita­ tion of surplus value, and to reveal the inadequacies and fetishism of the categories of economic science. With the development of eco­ nomics, the social relations of production and class institutions were reified and displaced by the mechanical workings of a fetishized social system—transcendent market laws.30 The basic features of science were expressed through the independent mechanics and structures of the economic system. Normative categories were re­ placed by functional categories, class by factors of production, and social contradictions by economic crises involving disequilibrium between production and consumption. “Economic crises thus lose the character of a fate accessible to self-reflection and acquire the objectivity of inexplicable, contingent, natural events.”31 The result was that science displaced and eliminated certain types of issues deemed relevant for public discussion; they were repressed by delegitimating them and splitting-off their concepts from the valid­ ity claims of science. The rationalization of science followed in the wake of a general rationalization of society. The logic of bureau­ cracy and method of specialization followed with the development of empirical social science which, too, repressed ethics and norma­ tive claims as invalid. The method of critique was not viewed as a true science since it did not follow the logic and procedures of posi­ tivism. Another example is provided in Weber’s theory of the metamor­ phosis of modern democracy into a technocratic and decisionistic, plebiscitary state. The substantive values of individual participation, freedom, public discourse, and self-realization have been retrans­ lated into a new narrative of electoral democracy, political leader­ ship, and the circulation of elites. Democracy is no longer a partici­ patory process toward self-enlightenment and a critical education in which individuals create their own history and social institutions. Rather it has become a political method for the rational exchange of class power and maintenance of political domination. There is no self-conscious general will and people do not decide the important issues; decisions are made by particular ruling groups who legally

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serve for a limited period of time. This is a politics of acclamation, not a politics based on self-conscious decision making. “Decisions themselves, according to the decisionistic view, must remain basi­ cally beyond public discussion.”32 The substantive content of the traditional ideals of democracy expressed in Rousseau and Mill are sublimated in a political technology for the rational choice of ad­ ministrative leaders in a competitive public market.33 Questions about social ethics and justice are forgotten as metaphysical irrelevancies and replaced by technical questions of efficiency and productivity of response to political demands. In Weber’s theory of political decisionism, reason is incapable of validating practical questions. There is an unbridgeable gap between the technical expert and the skilled politician and the latter has no rational basis upon which to justify practical decisions. Reason is exiled from politics and truth is simply the acceptance of actions of political leadership and the sub­ jective, arbitrary decisions of individuals. Ethical questions and prac­ tical decisions are freed from validity claims. Reason cannot medi­ ate between competing claims to truth and eventually falls silent. With the further rationalization of power and politics, the decisionistic model is superseded by the technocratic model in which the techni­ cal knowledge of specialized experts supplants political decision making. The dualistic model of Weber changes into one in which the politician becomes a tool for the further scientization of politics. Only by following the appropriate method of decision making, bu­ reaucratic rules, and formal democratic procedures can there be a justification of political action. The public world of discursive ratio­ nality and political discourse is displaced by the technician skilled in running the political and economic subsystems. The state becomes a steering mechanism to ensure the formal rationality and further expansion of capitalist accumulation. Science as Cognitive Interest and Political Ideology Habermas’s social theory updated much of Marxian critical theory in order to respond more adequately to the structural transforma­ tions of the neo-Keynesian world of advanced capitalism. Its main characteristics are: changes in the liberal market, growth of monopoly capitalism, increasing need for economic stability and regulariza­ tion of the business cycle, state interventionism, growing interde­ pendence between science and technology, and the scientization of production. This, in turn, led to changes in the nature of the class

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struggle, forms of political legitimation and domination, and the role of the welfare state. Habermas supplements Weber’s theory of ratio­ nalization with Parsons’s structural-functionalism and Luhmann’s theory of social systems.34 In his work, Legitimation Crisis, he fo­ cuses his attention on the role of science and technology in the le­ gitimation of advanced capitalist society. Legitimation no longer takes place at the level of an ideology of just exchange and the residual political ideals of a good society. Instead, it is science and technol­ ogy which normatively validate monopoly capitalism and immu­ nize class conflict from public reflection. Because the contemporary state is so actively involved in fiscal and budgetary policy, redistri­ bution of social wealth, expansion of economic opportunities and crisis avoidance, and maintenance of economic stability and politi­ cal legitimacy, the economy can no longer be judged independently or validated on its own criterion of just exchange. Recognition of the importance of state interventionism has affected the way in which the social system legitimates itself. One result of these transforma­ tions is that “the new politics of state interventionism requires a depoliticization of the mass of the population. To the extent that practical questions are eliminated, the public realm also loses its political function.”35 The state and civil law become technical mechanisms in the effi­ cient functioning of political demands and economic interests. Us­ ing formal reason, they solve economic and social problems through administrative and technical means within the system, which only tends to solidify the final goals of efficiency and productivity of private capital. Central practical question of ethics and politics, is­ sues about the direction of society and the possibilities of social jus­ tice, the nature of the good life, happiness, and democracy are lost.36 And just as they are lost at the practical level of social institutions, they are lost at the methodological level of metacritique. Positivism has displaced and repressed the need to discuss the nature of sci­ ence and the possibilities of human emancipation as outside the pa­ rameters of the experience of reflection. Science becomes an ide­ ology “impervious to self-reflection” whose purpose is to keep “ac­ tual power relations inaccessible to analysis and to public conscious­ ness.”37 That is, it inhibits reflection about politics and the disap­ pearance of public discourse, analysis of its own epistemology or alternative sociological methods, the phenomenological development of cultural forms and self-consciousness, and the structural expan-

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sion of rationalization and class exploitation. Science cannot be lo­ cated historically or sociologically within specific structures of capi­ talist society as it immunizes itself from critical reflection and cri­ tique of ideology. “It is a singular achievement of this ideology to detach society’s self-understanding from the frame of reference of communicative action and from the concepts of symbolic interac­ tion and replace it with a scientific model.”38 Lost are analyses of the history and structure of capitalism. The structural transformation of political economy has even affected the method and logic of sci­ entific knowledge, which leads us back to an analysis of Habermas’s theory of the normative foundations of social science. With the rationalization and fragmentation of society, there is a corresponding specialization and distortion of consciousness and reason. Habermas holds that the theories and methods of social re­ search splintered into positivism, hermeneutics, and dialectical sci­ ence, each with different claims to objectivity, truth, and validity. But since the end of the nineteenth century, positivism has been the ruling perspective within the social sciences with the others perceived as marginal or inappropriate methodologies. The positivists articu­ lated a view of science that justified a specific form of knowledge through deductive reasoning which produced theoretical statements capable of the explanation and prediction of effects and events. Ex­ planation and causality based on universal laws deduced from hy­ potheses were capable of experimental testing and intersubjective validation within the scientific community. This form of knowledge was objective since it was formed using the only valid scientific logic and procedures of deduction, experimentation, and justification. But Habermas argues that hidden beneath these surface claims to scientific truth lies an interest in producing a certain type of knowledge which reflects broader societal values of the “behavioral system of instrumen­ tal action”—knowledge used for the adaptation to the functional pre­ requisites of the social system. This type of science is also phenomeno­ logically indifferent to social norms since questions of “the sponta­ neity of hope...the response to suffering and oppression, the desire for adult autonomy, the will to emancipation, and the happiness of discovering one’s identity [are] dismissed for all time...”39 Habermas calls this a “disinfected reason.” The old distinction between fact and values dissolves within a critical social theory of knowledge. As we have already seen in Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas connects his theory of cognitive interests to the critique

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of epistemology found in the writings of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. After the Copernican Revolution and its transformation in German idealism and materialism, the metacritique of the social sciences in Germany contained reference to the subjective element in the for­ mation of objectivity and the objects of experience. Whether it was the transcendental subject, the Absolute Spirit, praxis, or class con­ sciousness, subjectivity was always involved in the constitution of objectivity. With the critique of epistemology and foundationalism, with the dialectic between subject and object, and with the phenom­ enological analysis of the self-constitution and formative develop­ ment of the human species in history, there is no ontological reality or pure objectivity waiting to be investigated and mirrored by a neu­ tral observer. Rather the objects of experience are a social construc­ tion based on quasi-transcendental and anthropological interests for continuing the social lifeworld. These cognitive interests in main­ taining society are institutionally expressed in labor and communi­ cative interaction or language. In Theory and Practice, objectivity or the object domain of science is related to the survival and flour­ ishing of social life made possible by the technical rationality of labor and the hermeneutical understanding of language, traditions, and social norms.40 There is a theoretical need for the biological and institutional survival of the human species and the practical need to establish rules, values, and norms which guide and expand indi­ vidual behavior and social interaction. Without these interests, soci­ ety would be impossible. Society’s need for physical survival, community integrity, and general stability affects issues of methodology, as well as the types of inquiry necessary for the continued maintenance of society in the future. Cognitive interests are the institutionalized form of subjec­ tive or social priorities which become part of the transcendental fab­ ric of social knowledge. This means that positivism is neither neu­ tral nor “objective” but rather reflects the interests of a rationalized society for technical knowledge that could help it control its develop­ ment, adapt to changing social circumstances, and avoid serious dis­ ruptions and crises. This type of science “extends and rationalizes our power, of technical control over the objects or—which comes to the same thing—objectified processes of nature and society.”41 In turn, it dismisses all other claims to scientific status as metaphysical and irra­ tional. These other interests and types of science are products of subjective values, ideological dogmatism, or political decisionism.

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According to Habermas, there are three cognitive interests (Erkenntnisinteresse) guiding scientific research and inquiry which correspond to three different forms of social science: technical con­ trol and instrumental rationality in the empirical-analytic method, understanding of meaning and social action in hermeneutical sci­ ence, and emancipation from domination in the dialectical or critical science. The cognitive interest of each determines the objectivity, method, and logic of the distinctive validity claims of each form of social science (Geisteswissenschaft). Hermeneutics originally devel­ oped out of philological interpretations of the meaning of theologi­ cal and juridical texts, especially the exegesis of the Bible in the early seventeenth century. As part of the method of the social sci­ ences, it emphasized issues of meaning and language within history. Early forms of hermeneutics examined the objectivity of cultural forms which included Hegel’s notion of the Objective Spirit and Dilthey’s theory of Verstehen. Hermeneutics had an inner psycho­ logical dimension as the researcher attempted to relive or empathize with the meaning of the original text. Later, the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, enlivened by Greek philosophy and an Aristotelian account of phronesis, took on the role of mediator within a conversation between the past and present, text and interpreter. Through a historical dialogue, a shared meaning and experience emerged in which the traditions and values of the past were transmitted to the present (Traditionsvermittlung).42 For Karl-Otto Apel, hermeneutics offers an interest in understanding the other, bridging time and individuals, in repairing connections between traditions, and in the symbolic act of sharing meaning and values. Its goal is that of mutual understanding and communication for the enhancement of practical life and the broadening of one’s cultural horizons and social possibilities as beings-in-the-world.43 There is a cognitive interest in self-understanding and enlighten­ ment within an embedded cultural and historical tradition. Already involved in the world and in history, individuals cannot arbitrarily abstract themselves through a false objectivity to form theoretical statements as occurs in natural science. In the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, the researcher is already situated in a par­ ticular culture and historical moment and, thus, has a pre-understanding of existing cultural values and social meanings (hermeneu­ tical circle). Reflection on the method of interpretive understanding (Verstehen) involves a reflection upon this general pre-reflective fore-

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knowledge (Vorverständnis) which organizes the objective experi­ ence of the world in terms of the horizons of meaning which under­ lie art, science, literature, religion, politics, and so forth. These be­ come the cultural values which direct the intentionality and ideals of human action.44 Hermeneutics has a cognitive interest in “maintaining the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding in ordinary-language com­ munication and in action according to common norms.”45 It is an interpretive science of historiography and philology whose purpose is the continued historical dialogue between individuals, groups, and traditions that facilitates a common understanding, a shared mean­ ing of the world for the purpose of reciprocal and self-understand­ ing (Selbstverständnis), and an unconstrained consensus for politi­ cal and ethical action. Self-enlightenment and intersubjective con­ sensus permits the cultural and normative survival of society through individual self-consciousness and shared social norms. An under­ standing of the cultural traditions, meaning, and history of ourselves and others permits an expansion of the horizons of values and ideals that guide human life and provide meaning and purpose to human existence, interaction between traditions and groups, and a free and open communication between individuals as to the practical inten­ tions of social action. If Socrates had argued that the unexamined life was not worth living, then Habermas provides the institutional context within which self-consciousness and mutual understanding take place. Through interpretive sociology and philology the nor­ mative horizons of the past and present expressed in texts, institu­ tions, and actions are broadened and the future objectives and goals are consensually clarified and agreed upon. Through dialogue within history between individuals and traditions, a rational consensus ( Verständigung) is reached about the future. The social sciences fa­ cilitate this shared understanding, not for the purpose of technical control over social development, but for mutual self-enlightenment and a shared future. A problem arises that the past may not be as transparent to critical self-reflection, dialogue not as free and unconstrained, and the fu­ ture not as open to consensual agreement as hermeneutical science would like. That is, between theory and practice, self-reflection and practical action, there may be objectified social institutions, reified cultural perspectives, and forms of socialization that hide and distort power structures and class relationships that make the goals of herme-

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neutics impossible to realize.46 It is at this point that Habermas intro­ duces the need for emancipatory or dialectical science. “Those in­ terests which bind consciousness to the yoke imposed by the domi­ nation of things and reified relations are, as material interests, an­ chored in historically specific configurations of alienated labor, de­ nied satisfactions, and suppressed freedom.”47 This third form of science finds its expression in structural sociology (Weber), critique of ideology (Marx), functionalism (Parsons), and critical psycho­ analysis (Freud). The goal of hermeneutics is an emancipated soci­ ety which allows for the free exchange of ideas, mutual understand­ ing, and rational consensus. But questions about class exploitation, economic inequality, and political domination intervene to force us to consider a variety of new issues: How is rational consensus about practical values and social norms possible; how are self-identity, mutual understanding, and unrestrained communication possible in a society built upon contradictory class interests? How is free and autonomous moral development of the individual possible given the growing poverty, inequality of distribution and control over produc­ tion, depoliticization of the public sphere, and the blinding consum­ erism and narcissism of mass society? To get a better understanding of these questions necessitates that we consider a variety of macro­ level issues, such as the structural and historical transformation of the workplace and monopoly capitalism, the rise of institutions of systematically distorted communication, the prevalence of false con­ sciousness and ideology, the institutionalization of uncoupled and split-off symbols, and the micro-development of distorted personal­ ity and unconscious repression.48 These structural and functional features of modern capitalism are developed in more detail in Habermas’s empirical and sociological works, Structural Change of the Public Sphere (1962), Technology and Science as *Ideology7 (1968), and Legitimation Crisis (1973). Habermas’s central theoretical insight is that embedded deep within the structures of language and social institutions are unconscious power relations which inhibit self-conscious reflection and social critique. “The power relations [are] surreptitiously incorporated in the symbolic structures of the systems of speech and action.”49 They can only be uncovered by integrating the three distinct methods of sociological inquiry, that is, by examining the structural differentia­ tion and functional integration of the economic, political, and cul­ tural systems in society through functional analysis, interpretive

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hermeneutics, and emancipatory science. Since modernity is char­ acterized by industrial production and capitalist social relations that tend to produce various forms of social crises, the social system protects and shields itself from critical review by complex mecha­ nisms of repression of human needs and self-consciousness, mal­ formation of personality and socialization, and ideological distor­ tions. The hermeneutical interest in establishing a cultural dialogue with past traditions is inhibited by malformed species development under capitalist social relations of production. To unveil the relation­ ships between the social system, cultural legitimation, and distorted psychological and social development necessitates a subtle integra­ tion of the three forms of cognitive interests in empirical-analytic, interpretive, and dialectical science. Critical sociology has three cru­ cial elements: it examines the empirical structures and functions in terms of explanations and causes, understanding of social meaning and cultural traditions, and unrestrained communication and enlight­ ened self-consciousness. While Weber had failed in his attempted integration of a sociology of explanation and understanding, Habermas justifies his methodology by means of an analysis of the logic of inquiry in terms of his own social theory and the social totality of interacting subsystems. Historical sociology examines the meaning and conscious inten­ tions of social action in analogous fashion to the study of the mean­ ing of a text.50 But many times the reasons or causes for an action are unknown, repressed, or the result of anonymous structural fea­ tures in society. Sometimes causal explanation cannot be reduced to the individualistic methodology of hermeneutics, as utterances and actions do not reflect explicit intentions. When there is a real lack of self-transparency and understanding; when there is a discrepancy between intentions and actions; when actions are incompatible with self-described meaning; when there are unintended or unanticipated consequences; or when effects are unrelated to the original self-con­ scious meaning of individuals involved, then alternative methods of sociology must be applied which deal with issues of underlying struc­ tural and causal explanation.51 Gerard Radnitzky, in Contemporary Schools o f Metascience, also contends that access to these other causes can be derived only from the psychoanalysis of unconscious motives, the critique of ideologies, and the empirical study of the structural and functional needs and anonymous forces in the social system. “The need for these quasi-naturalistic turns (or phases) in

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humanist historiography makes the latter continuous or overlapping with social science.”52 The elements of empirical explanation and causality are borrowed from the analytic tradition, but the expecta­ tion is that once the underlying and hidden causes are “explained,” the reasons for social action will finally be understood. Radnitzky is very clear that it is only this element of analytical science that is taken, not the more general philosophy of science and metaphysics that underlies it. Understanding and Meaning in Interpretive Hermeneutics Besides the instrumental interest in the technological control over nature and social relationships, there is also a need for conscious reflection, self-understanding, and dialogue between individuals and cultural traditions. This is the work of hermeneutical science found in the writings of Dilthey and Gadamer. It offers an alternative view of objectivity, truth, and science. The early Dilthey attempts to un­ derstand the meaning of human actions through psychological em­ pathy or the subjective understanding of the actor’s original inten­ tions. He later abandons this approach for the more systematic ob­ servation and experiential reconstruction of the manifestations of the human mind in historical and cultural institutions and symbolic artifacts. The world in which we live is constructed of symbolic rep­ resentations and objective meanings, that is, it is a product of the externalization and objectification of the human mind expressed through language in purposes, values, and ideals. Through ideas, symbols, and actions these inner states of consciousness become external representations and cultural meanings. The method of herme­ neutics attempts to reconstruct the origins and development of the mind in society in terms of its objective experience, linguistic and intentional expression, and understanding. Meaning is objectified in language, intentional action, and non-verbal movements. The pur­ pose of hermeneutics is to interpret the meaning of these objective experiences which find expression in terms of ordinary language. The goal of interpretive understanding is to reconstruct historically the practical experiences of the mind in order to comprehend the self-formative process of the subject. As Habermas writes in Knowl­ edge and Human Interests about Dilthey: “The life of the mind con­ sists in externalizing itself in objectivations and at the same time returning to itself in the reflection of its extemalizations. The history of mankind is integrated into this self-formative process of mind.”53

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Dilthey likens hermeneutical self-reflection to the autobiographi­ cal experience in which self-understanding occurs within our own experiences, expressions, and understanding. We interpret the mean­ ing of events and occurrences by incorporating them through the corpus of our own autobiography. As the event is understood, our own history is reflexively reconstructed. Life history of a unified and self-conscious ego is formed out of the collectivity of practical life experiences and mediated through a retrospective interpretation of the past. The particular is always filtered and interpreted through the whole; the former requires the latter in order to be known. Sub­ jective meaning is interpreted through significance (Bedeutung). Sig­ nificance, in turn, is the transcendental structure which integrates the particular moments into a comprehensive and unified whole of the accumulated experiences of the subject. Objectivity is known only if it is placed in the broader context of our previous experi­ ences and understanding. This pre-understanding of the world helps us in our attempt to interpret our daily lives. It is the very historicity of our being which makes the understanding of the objects of his­ tory possible. In the cultural sciences, the totality of the self-formative process of the mind, manifested in its cultural and institutional forms, makes the objects of experience accessible to social inquiry. Applying the insights of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to historical reason, Dilthey writes, “The mind only understands what it has created.”54 The tran­ scendental categories of the understanding have been replaced by the cultural forms of experience that constitute synthetic a priori judg­ ments about the world. What individuals understand is the objective spirit, which is only the projections and extemalizations of their own subjective selves. Hermeneutics involves a self-reflective analysis on the cultural objectivity of the subject. Finally, as every individual is self-reflectively transparent to him- or herself through autobio­ graphical recollection, Dilthey recognizes that this process also in­ volves an intersubjective dialogue based on mutual recognition and understanding of others. The cultural manifestations of the mind is a common heritage shared within the community. The social psycho­ logical dimension of this insight will be further examined by George Herbert Mead.55 This relation between the particular individual and the general has important implications for the methodology of herme­ neutics in how it defines objectivity, validation, and science. In the end, however, Habermas finds that Dilthey, like many of the other

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classical social theorists, cannot break with traditional scientific ob­ jectivity and falls into some form of covert positivism. Though he clearly develops a transcendental critique of the conditions of his­ torical reason and hermeneutical science, he eventually reverts to a method of psychological reexperiencing or empathy which, Habermas contends, has much in common with the objectivism found in the empirical-analytic method. The methodological implications of the relationship between un­ derstanding and interpretation for the cultural sciences is further developed in the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer who connects hermeneutics to the practical traditions of Greek philosophy and Roman jurisprudence.56 In 1960 Gadamer’s major work, Truth and Method, was published. In it, he searches for the philosophical foun­ dation of hermeneutics in Aristotle’s distinctions in book six of the Nicomachean Ethics among the intellectual virtues of theoretical knowledge (episteme), political wisdom (phronesis), and technical knowledge (techne). By distinguishing between the contemplation of the philosopher, the political participation and moral judgment of the citizen, and the creative work of the artisan, Gadamer was able to establish a broader context for an examination of the nature of interpretive understanding of aesthetic and historical texts. Accord­ ing to this Aristotelian interpretation, moral judgments and political decisions should not be reduced to transcendent universal knowl­ edge or formal application of rules and techniques. There is no moral episteme or political techne. Moral knowledge can only come about through a slow process of character maturation through participa­ tion in the political life of the Greek polis. Through the development of a strong and virtuous character, acquisition of political wisdom and experiential knowledge, and understanding of the traditions and ethos of the Greek community, the individual learns to appreciate the subtleties of the community’s social values. Moral and political truths are developed through experience and civic participation, not through the acquisition of contemplative or technical knowledge. Moral character develops in service to the polis through the expres­ sion and maturation of rationality in public discourse; it matures over years of virtuous action in support of political solidarity and moral development. Universality is relative to the ethical situation as wis­ dom in judging these situations is learned over time through the development of a citizen’s character and moral being. Platonic forms, Kantian moral imperatives, and scientific objectivity are rejected by

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Gadamer as inadequate to an understanding of the political and moral dimensions of Aristotle’s ethical and political philosophy. As Gadamer writes, “What is right, for example, cannot be fully determined inde­ pendently of the situation that requires a right action from me, whereas the eidos of what a craftsman wants to make is fully deter­ mined by the use for which it is intended.”57 Moral action is tied to the character and virtue of the citizen; ex­ pressed in the constitution, values, and traditions of the political com­ munity; and is a product of political education, public discourse, and self-enlightenment. Both Aristotle and Gadamer see these same principles at work in the procedures of jurisprudence. Under the principle of equity, abstract and universal legal principles are ap­ plied to concrete situations in a flexible and just way. An inflexible and unmediated application of the law could result in injustice. The universal does not contain within itself all possible forms of applica­ tion to particular circumstances. The law must be understood by relating the universal and the particular flexibly. This is the role of the judge who mediates between the principles and their applica­ tion. This interpretation of legal hermeneutics provides the basis for appreciating the ontological dimension of our nature as Verstehen. That is, human beings are historical and interpretive beings already involved in understanding and evaluating the world. We are not situ­ ated objectively outside the process as philosophical or scientific knowledge presupposes. By borrowing Heidegger’s insights and vocabulary, Gadamer believes that the Cartesian dualism between subjective consciousness and objective reality is overcome. We are already beings-in-the-world. We are actively engaged with the world, interpreting and understanding it; we permit its being there; we al­ low it to disclose itself to others over time through our various forms of philosophical, moral, and technical knowledge. “Understanding always implies a pre-understanding which is in turn pre-figured by the determinate tradition in which the interpreter lives and which shapes his prejudices.”58 For Gadamer, Aristotle’s theory of phronesis and Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein bring into focus Greek ethics and politics and the modern problem of hermeneutical understand­ ing. The lingering objectivism and positivism of Dilthey have been rejected as Gadamer establishes the foundations of hermeneutics in Greek philosophy and existential ontology. Truth and Method outlines the method of interpretive understand­ ing by analyzing the subjective mode of consciousness, its being-

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in-the-world, and its mode of historical existence as understanding. Gadamer connects the ontology of Dasein as an interpretive being to the historical method and the hermeneutic circle. The act of un­ derstanding involves a dialogue between the subject and object, knower and text. It is a communication between the horizons of different cultural traditions of the past and present. Both the text to be interpreted and the philologist are beings-there who express dif­ ferent horizons of meaning and possibilities. Through understand­ ing there is a shared reciprocity of meaning as both the language of the text and interpreter communicate their traditions and historical moments in the act of interpretation. Though the text does have a “true meaning,” it offers a number of different possible interpreta­ tions because readers of the text come from different cultural preju­ dices and historical traditions. The questions they ask receive differ­ ent responses from the text as it speaks to the present. “The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding.”59 The text as phenom­ enon is a dialogical product of historical consciousness and cultural traditions. Objectivity is not an external object waiting to be techni­ cally manipulated and scientifically explained, but rather, is a dia­ logue and fusion of different horizons of meaning (Horizontverschmelzung). For Gadamer, this reciprocity, or herme­ neutical circle, of historical horizons and temporal dimensions does not lead to relativity or subjectivity, but is the ontological basis upon which the world is made possible and understood. This understand­ ing rests upon the fore-structures of meaning in subjective conscious­ ness. The Kantian transcendental subject has been integrated with Heideggerian ontology to form the hermeneutical consciousness. It represents a mode of existence characterized by interpretive under­ standing (historicity) and involvement with the world (facticity)— the hermeneutical Dasein. According to Gadamer, unpacking the fore-structures of the un­ derstanding provides insight into the distinctive methodology of the historical method: fore-having (Vorhabe), fore-sight (Vorsicht), and fore-conception (Vorgriff). The interpreter comes to the reading of a text with a set of cultural values and horizons (fore-having) through which the text is first engaged. At this encounter a dialogue ensues in which there is an initial interpretation of the meaning of the text (fore-conceptions); a provisional meaning is projected onto the text.

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As the interpreter becomes more familiar with the material under analysis and its traditional meanings, other interpretations begin to open up and the possibilities inherent in the text blossom (fore-sight). The understanding of a text is “always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history.”60 Gadamer calls this “historically ef­ fected consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). There is a field of projected meaning which surrounds both the text and interpreter. With a more sophisticated understanding, the text speaks through time to the interpreter and is a co-partner in the process. Through dialectical interaction and a reciprocal exchange of histori­ cal horizons and traditions of beings-there (Dasein), there is con­ tinuous readjustment in the original fore-meanings. These cultural and subjective prejudgments and horizons permit the text to be read and evaluated. Both the interpreter and text (traditions) have these fore-meanings and pre-conceptions which are communicated and shared in the interpretive process. There is a dialogical and interpre­ tive relation between the subject and the object. There is no reified, universal meaning of the author waiting to be grasped by the objective and unbiased reader. Gadamer rejects the historicism and positivism of both Schleiermacher and Dilthey who envisioned the past as something to be discovered. “To understand a text always means to apply it to ourselves and to know that, even if it must always be understood in different ways, it is still the same text presenting itself to us in these different ways.”61 All understand­ ing and interpretation involves the fore-structures of the mind. Indi­ viduals, as linguistic animals and tradition sharers, attempt to under­ stand the history and culture of their present and past. They are al­ ready pre-consciously involved in the world interpreting and under­ standing it as they move to their own future possibilities. It is these very pre-conceptions and fore-structures which permit our engage­ ment with the world as cultural and historical beings. Compared with our scientific knowledge and technical involvement in the world, this is not a defective mode of being: A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as one initial meaning emerges in the text... .The process that Heidegger describes is that every revision of the fore-projection is capable of projecting before itself a new projection of meaning; rival projects can emerge side by side until it becomes clearer what the unity o f meaning is; interpretation begins with fore-concepts that are replaced by more suitable ones. This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding and interpretation. A person who

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is trying to understand is exposed to distraction from fore-meanings that are not borne out by the things themselves.... Working-out of appropriate projects, anticipatory in nature, to be confirmed ‘by the things’ themselves, is the constant task of understand­ ing.62

The objectivity of meaning is determined within a dialectical rela­ tionship between text and interpreter and the traditions out of which both come. In Aristotle’s theory of practical wisdom (phronesis) and Gadamer’s theory of consciousness and hermeneutics, the universal and the particular are reciprocally related in which there is no objec­ tivity which stands outside of the ethos of the community or the pre­ understandings of the individual; this is called a “false objectivity” by Gadamer. The experience of interpretation provides an integra­ tion of cultural traditions, a blending of horizons of meaning, and a further development of self-understanding of the past and possibili­ ties for the future. Through an exchange of horizons, there is a dis­ course of meaning between temporal and cultural dimensions. Un­ derstanding is already an act of selection and interpretation in which pre-conscious values and prejudices (eidos) are applied as the herme­ neutical process moves toward self-conscious enlightenment. All understanding involves interpretation, since translation is always in terms of the interpreter’s pre-conceptions and fore-meanings. Un­ derstanding and method, hermeneutics and ontology are tied to ex­ istential being. Habermas appropriates much of Gadamer’s critical hermeneutics in his theory of communicative action and discourse ethics, espe­ cially his treatment of historical consciousness and self-understand­ ing, the hermeneutical and dialogical method, pre-understandings and the fore-structures of consciousness, the fusion of horizons and interpretation of meaning, the interrelationships between understand­ ing, interpretation, and application, Greek phronesis and hermeneu­ tical understanding, and the methodological critique of historicism, relativism, and positivism. However, in spite of his enthusiasm, Habermas does have some reservations about the hermeneutical method.63 He criticizes Gadamer for his uncritical acceptance of tra­ dition and authority in the process of self-understanding. His failure to undertake a phenomenological or materialist critique of ideology leaves unexamined the fore-structures of meaning which must be­ come part of a critical social science. He also accuses Gadamer of furthering the progress of positivism by his uncritical acceptance of the given traditions of the past. Though hermeneutics is an essential

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part of sociology, there must be a reflexive method which analyzes the power relations, ideology, and distorted consciousness produced by dialogue between traditions. In On the Logic o f the Social Sci­ ences■, Habermas writes, “Gadamer fails to appreciate the power of reflection that unfolds in Verstehen (understanding).”64 The method of Verstehen lacks a critical element of self-conscious reflection on the hidden assumptions and values, and unconscious power rela­ tions of appropriated traditions. Gadamer is incapable of raising these types of issues because of his connection to a neo-Kantian philoso­ phy of social science and his Heideggerian existential ontology. Habermas asks how we are to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate prejudices and values. He seeks a method which, though it incorporates much of the hermeneutical approach, also leaves room for reflection on the unconscious norms, social institutions, and forms of domination in modern society that distort potential self-enlight­ enment and emancipation. “The objective context in terms of which alone social action can be understood is constituted conjointly by language, labor, and domination.”65 This recognition of the weak­ nesses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and the need to investigate struc­ tures of power and control direct Habermas to move beyond the meth­ odology of hermeneutics to a critical theory based on functionalism. Gadamer is not aware, according to Habermas, of the methodological problems related to false consciousness: language may be a form of ideology; dialogue may be systematically and structurally distorted; and traditions may be repressive or hide authoritarian values. Gadamer’s theory of understanding does not help us explain the rationalization of power and the institutions of everyday life. This criticism of hermeneutics is aptly summarized by Russell Keat: “Through its exclusive concern with self-understanding of social agents it [hermeneutics] is unable to identify the existence of self­ misunderstanding, of ideological consciousness. Nor can it recog­ nize the significance of structural features of society that operate as unconscious determinants of social phenomena. Its non-critical atti­ tude towards dominant forms of consciousness and practice con­ ceals the way these function to maintain systematic a-symmetries of power and control.”66 As the works of Hegel, Marx, and Freud have shown, the formation of consciousness and the structures of lan­ guage and symbols must be examined within broader historical and sociological contexts. Kantian epistemology and Heideggerian hermeneutics must be supplemented with a different kind of social

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science. Habermas writes in further criticism of Gadamer: “This hermeneutic consciousness proves inadequate in the case of sys­ tematically distorted communication....There is, therefore, no gen­ eral criterion available to us which would allow us to determine when we are subject to the false consciousness of a pseudo-normal under­ standing.”67 Reality is socially constructed through language and understanding, labor and technical rationality, and political domina­ tion and ideological control. Of the three key variables for the un­ derstanding of objectivity and meaning, hermeneutics is inadequate to the examination of labor (structures) and domination (symbols). This requires Habermas to turn to Marx and Freud. In On the Logic of the Social Sciences, Habermas draws upon the insights of Arthur Danto, William Dray, R. G. Collingwood, and Pe­ ter Winch as he concludes that “the historical context is not exhausted by the mutual intentions of human beings. Motivated actions are embedded in a quasi-natural context that is mediated by subjectively intended meaning, but not created by it.”68 Having rejected the di­ rect observation of intentional behavior in both positivism and historicism, he supplements the hermeneutical theory of subjectively intended meaning with a theory of objective meaning which includes a critique of latent meaning, repressed intentions, unconscious mo­ tives, and distorted ideologies in the functionalism of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Subjective meaning can only be understood through a reconstruction of intersubjectively shared motives, meaning, and intentions within a broader field of cultural values and an “objective frame of reference.” This methodology goes beyond subjective intentionality to an examination of the underlying motives of human action that are reified in social institutions and in the process of so­ cialization and personality development. It inquires into the structures of power that lie hidden in language, discourse, and cultural meaning. This widening of the sociological investigation requires an integration of interpretive sociology with a causal-analytic science of explana­ tion. This is to be accomplished, however, without an acceptance of the latter’s search for general theories, technical knowledge, and functionalist goals of equilibrium and self-regulation. Repressed Meaning and Explanatory Understanding in Freudian Psychoanalysis Habermas appropriates the writings of Sigmund Freud as essen­ tial to supplement the interpretive hermeneutics of Dilthey and

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Gadamer and to provide insight into the explanatory dimension of class, structure, and power in critical social science.69 He accom­ plishes this by integrating the hermeneutical self-understanding of human action with the causal explanation of the unconscious mo­ tives of human behavior.70 Returning to Knowledge and Human Interests we see that Habermas uses Freud as his model for clarify­ ing the nature of causality and explanation needed by his critical historical sociology which attempts to explain the impact of objecti­ fied social structures and historical processes on human behavior. These external influences, unlike the consciously formed reasons and subjectively intended meanings directing human action, act like independent natural laws motivating human behavior. “For psycho­ analysis joins hermeneutics with operations that genuinely seemed to be reserved to the natural sciences.”71 Habermas moves beyond both the philosophy of consciousness of German Idealism and the self-conscious transparency of subjectivity found in interpretive hermeneutics. Causal explanations attempt to access the sedimented and reified social relations based on class power and political domi­ nation that unconsciously affect human actions. Individuals are buf­ feted by political, economic, and cultural causes lying outside their awareness and control which the cognitive interest of hermeneutical self-understanding wishes to bring to conscious reflection. Though borrowing aspects of the empirical-analytic tradition, especially its emphasis on causality, explanation, and human behavior and by in­ tegrating it with the philological and historical method of hermeneu­ tics, critical sociology refuses to accept the epistemological and on­ tological assumptions of positivism regarding objectivity, verifica­ tion, and methodological universality. Freud provides subtle clues on how to accomplish this methodological integration of different and, at times, conflicting methods. In order to appreciate the methodological importance of Freud’s depth hermeneutics to Habermas’s philosophy of social science, it is necessary to outline the former’s metapsychology and theory of dreams. Psychoanalysis and hermeneutics are joined immediately in Freud’s theory of dream interpretation as memory and dreams are treated as distorted forms of language. They are literary texts and traditions open to philological analysis. In distinction to the trans­ parent hermeneutics of subjective consciousness and biography of Dilthey and Gadamer, Freud perceives the need for a new method that would delve beneath the surface of consciousness into the deeper

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layers of the mind and the darker realm of the repressed and socially censored. This area of the unconscious lies beneath the phenomenal surface of intentionality and conscious life and attempts to distort the meaning of autobiographical texts. It requires an expanded herme­ neutics that would seek meaning in the expressions of dreams, parapraxes (slips of the tongue), and the hysterical symptoms of neuro­ ses. The unconscious is to be systematically treated as a mutilated and distorted text that must first be reconfigured and then re­ translated. Understanding and interpretation are not immediately accessible because meaning is mutilated and finds expression in substitute forms; consciousness hides and distorts the mental text for purposes of censorship, resistance, and self-protection. “Psy­ choanalytic interpretation, in contrast, is not directed at meaning structures in the dimension of what is consciously intended....[it] cannot be confined to the procedures of philology but rather unites linguistic analysis with the psychological investigation of causal con­ nections.”72 Habermas views Freud as expanding Dilthey’s three classes of life expression—symbolic structures, action, and experiential expres­ sions, but within the framework of the distortion of language and disturbance of memory. Language no longer expresses intentional meaning and subjective consciousness, but has a latent content that remains inaccessible and alienated from hermeneutics. Action and nonverbal expressions are separated from ordinary language and have a hidden meaning or “internal foreign territory” which appears only as a mutilated text. Instead of ignoring the slips and distortions as outside of normal psychology, Freud places them at its center. The distorted texts themselves are transformed into objects of scien­ tific inquiry. Dream analysis becomes a methodological process of reflection when authoritarian structures and power relationships force the censorship and repression of sexual needs that conflict with so­ cial norms and family values. Since human needs are never elimi­ nated, only constrained and confined, they find alternative sources of symbolic expression in distorted language, dreams, and neuro­ ses. In dreams, different and strange images replace the sought after goal (displacement); texts are widely distorted, rearranged, and lost (condensation); meaning is never transparent and clear (resistance); and self-enlightenment and understanding are alienated from the subject. All this occurs with the complicity of the subject who resists every effort to discover the true meaning of the expressions. The

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text does eventually offer a hidden and latent meaning that a critical depth hermeneutics can slowly uncover. The mechanism and structure of repression are formed with the separation of needs from motivation. This is accomplished when need dispositions and motives of action no longer have an objective voice in the public realm. They are split-off from linguistic repre­ sentations and public symbols as they develop a private content and idiosyncratic grammar. Since needs are always linguistically inter­ preted, only those values and needs that find a voice in the public through ordinary language are capable of expression and satisfac­ tion; only those needs that find institutional support and linguistic expression can be made manifest and be realized. Otherwise, they fail to achieve recognition and are forgotten. Both language and action are deformed in the process. “The psychically most effective way to render undesired need dispositions harmless is to exclude from public communication the interpretations to which they are attached—in other words, repression.”73 Intentional actions and con­ scious motivations become unconscious and delinguisticized wishes that are banished from reflection and find expression in private lan­ guages and the preconscious, daily residues of dreams. Not having a language to express themselves, needs are lost and forgotten. Wishes can only achieve a form of satisfaction outside of the public chan­ nels of censorship and repression. When they take pathological turns in neurotic and hysterical behavior, they can be disruptive to activ­ ity in everyday life. This is why a surface hermeneutics is inadequate, because it cannot delve into the deep structures of concealed mean­ ings and disturbed interactions. Psychoanalysis becomes a theory of d isto r te d c o m m u n ic a tio n .74

By means of narrative condensation, need displacement, content omission, and degrammaticized language, the real needs and origi­ nal meanings of the individual are censored in dreams. Having no public voice, no cultural support in values, no recognizable logic or grammar, and no linguistic expression, basic human needs are lost to conscious memory and forgotten. “Both psychological and offi­ cial censorship suppress linguistic material and the meanings articu­ lated in it.”75 Since needs and meanings have only a private, excom­ municated language to express themselves, the ego is not transpar­ ent to itself, does not understand its own autobiography and history, and does not know the reasons for its actions. The result is a dis­ torted self-formation process. The hermeneutical interest in self-un-

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derstanding goes unfulfilled as the individual lives in a world of false objectivity, private illusions, and mental distortions. The indi­ vidual fails to see that this “communicative disturbance” is the result of outside forces of compulsion and domination as the actual en­ ergy of repression comes from its own inner anxieties and fears. To explain the mechanism of repression, resistance, and distorted communication between the patient and physician in the clinical setting, Freud constructs a detailed structural model and metapsychology of the mind. The ego, id, and superego represent functional aspects of the psyche that are engaged in the process of concealing the power of external social institutions and internal re­ pression. Though Freud’s explicit statements on method tie psycho­ analysis to the natural sciences, Habermas contends that the actual application of psychoanalysis produces an alternative interpretation based on the practical interests of undistorted communication, self­ reflection, and enlightenment. There are parallels between the em­ pirical-analytic method and psychoanalysis. They are both based on careful empirical analysis, detailed analytical categories, general theories, explanatory and causal laws, hypothesis based on initial conditions (dialogue), and truth claims grounded in empirical verifi­ cation. However, these basic methodological similarities on closer analysis take on a different meaning in Freudian metapsychology. The purpose of Freud’s theory is to mediate between language de­ formation and behavioral pathologies. It offers a new and transformed general public language that constructs a morally integrated narra­ tive or life history of the patient which explains the process of un­ conscious repression and distorted socialization, and brings about self-conscious awareness of this process. “The subject must be able to relate his own history and have comprehended the inhibitions that blocked the path of self-reflection.”76 Freud applies a structuralist model of the mind, analyzes the func­ tional workings of its psychological system, and places it within a theoretical framework of the historical stages of childhood develop­ ment. This is done for the purpose of creating a comprehensive and emancipatory narrative of the complete actions and memories of the patient’s alienated consciousness. This metapsychology provides hypothetical and provisional constructs—general interpretations— that “anticipate the experience of reflection” that the patient is un­ able to provide him- or herself. The physician sees causal relation­ ships between the empirical findings of symptoms and distorted com-

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munication and the existence of split-off symbols and deformed lan­ guage. That is, a causal relationship is seen between past conflicts and unrealizable needs, on the one hand, and present somatic prob­ lems on the other. “A causal connection is formulated hypotheti­ cally as a hermeneutically understandable meaning structure.”77 Over time the patient begins to comprehend more detailed relationships between his or her life history, childhood memories, and repressed experiences. This newly reconstructed autobiography is a personal narrative free from the distortions of the unconscious and substitute gratifications. “In contrast to the hermeneutic anticipation of the philologist, general interpretation is ‘fixed’ and, like a general theory, must prove itself through predictions deduced from it.”78 The pre­ dictions following from the application of Freudian metatheory help the patient reconstruct forgotten childhood memories of repression. Depth Hermeneutics and Critical Historical Sociology Though there are strong elements of functionalism, positivism, and systems theory in Habermas’s interpretation of Freud, he clearly recognizes the boundary line between their cognitive interests and methodologies. There are three areas of major differences between the two forms of natural and critical science: their language of inter­ pretation, the nature of empirical verification, and the logic of ex­ planation. The language of interpretation is both hermeneutical and historical. A narrative or biography is created with the aid of theo­ retical constructs that reconstruct the life history of the patient in which psychological pathologies are reconnected to a public lan­ guage that facilitates discourse between the patient and physician. Although the narrative is deeply personal and unique, it is orga­ nized around a general and theoretical model of depth psychology. The latter provides “a systematically generalized history” or ideal type of ego development, textual exegesis, and a public re-reading and re-understanding of lost experiences to be integrated with the contingency of a particular life history. It creates a new language and grammar for the understanding of past experiences, unconscious motives, and repressed memories. Habermas argues that there is an analogy here with the method of the natural sciences—the applica­ tion of general theories and lawlike hypotheses to initial conditions in order to produce explanatory statements and predictions. But un­ like the framework of instrumental action and technical rationality, the material for the initial conditions is derived not from observation

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but from clinical dialogue exposing symbolic expressions, life his­ tory, and interpretive understanding.79 The second area of difference lies in the application of general interpretations of metapsychology. The testing of hypotheses are validated not on the basis of empirical and intersubjective observa­ tion, but rather on the basis of self-recollection and individual eman­ cipation from compelling forces and neurotic symptoms. Objective validity is accomplished through a discursive and communicative interaction between patient and physician. “The interpretation of a case is corroborated only by the successful continuation of a selfformative process, that is by the completion of self-reflection...”80 Thus though there are general theories of interpretation that are tied to clinical observations and empirical analyses of particular events and experiences that must ultimately be tested and validated, the method of explanatory understanding rests within a critical herme­ neutics and not logical positivism. The understanding of repressed memories and distorted language is a hermeneutical issue for the reappropriation of the experience of self-reflection. Unconscious motives, suppressed intentions, and repressed needs manifest them­ selves in distorted symbolic forms. They are thus amenable to herme­ neutical and historical inquiry. “Psychoanalysis appears as a herme­ neutic exploration of unconsciously motivated behavior. It has more to do with the critical exegesis of texts than with empirical science.”81 Finally, the third area of difference lies in the nature of theoretical constructs themselves. Hermeneutical understanding and causal ex­ planation are capable of being integrated into a critical social sci­ ence since human action has been transformed into reified and re­ pressed motives that take the phenomenal form of natural and law­ like instincts. Here again there is a connection between methodol­ ogy and the rationalization of domination in modern society. With the growing technical control over nature, the social organization of production, the inequalities of social distribution, and forms of con­ spicuous consumption, individual self-consciousness and intentionality have been eliminated in favor of the efficiency and productiv­ ity of instrumental rationality. Individuals have become more alien­ ated and turned into productive members of the iron cage of con­ sumerism. With unconscious repression, distortion of language, and the loss of memory, human behavior is less responsive to individual reflection and corresponds more to the external causality found in nature. But here, too, there is a difference with the natural sciences

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since the logic of causality found in explanatory understanding is derived from the dialectic between theory and practice (initial con­ ditions). There is no pure theory as exists in natural science. The sociological and methodological implications of Habermas’s analysis of Freud becomes clearer in his later work, On the Logic of the Social Sciences. The hermeneutical paradigm recognizes the importance of the pre-understanding of cultural values in conscious­ ness that affects our understanding of the world. In modem society, Habermas sees this pre-understanding expressed in terms of behav­ ioral systems of rationalization and the form of instrumental knowl­ edge that it reflects. The underlying assumptions of science assist in the stabilization of the modem social system by providing technical knowledge for purposive-rational action of adaptation—crisis avoid­ ance and system maintenance by the bureaucratic state. Habermas is aware that this has methodological implications since knowledge, that does not conform to these system interests, social roles, and structures of meaning, is repressed. It cannot be immediately inte­ grated into the social system or roles of the individual. Just as the suppressed needs of the individual reappear in dreams, parapraxes, and somatic symptoms, at the macro level these needs take the form either of utopian values with their anticipatory hopes for the future or ideologies which, while repressing the realization of certain val­ ues and types of action, legitimate the social system. The sexual language of Freud’s metatheory is replaced by the language of political and cultural repression; the unconscious is in­ habited by split-off symbols and political ideals of democracy, jus­ tice, and freedom instead of by the Oedipal drives toward patricide and incest. Drives and needs are repressed and censored through rationalization and institutionalization. Like neurotic symptoms, these needs reappear as socially accepted and transformed values institu­ tionalized in distorted roles and ideology. Repression transforms subjective meaning into unconscious causes and psychological motives. With a very Freudian characterization, Habermas writes that ideologies “serve to legitimate instances of drive-suppression and projective substitute gratification...in other words, they serve to le­ gitimate positions of authority and to direct socially undesirable drive impulses...into non-threatening channels.”82 Repressed needs and motives find expression in utopian dreams and political ideologies; they are needs that are expressed as split-off symbols and find ar­ ticulation in unintentional motivations and social roles of legitimate

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behavior. But even these distortions of language express an alterna­ tive functional need of the social system for integrating values, so­ cial norms, and communicative action. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas details Weber’s theory of rationalization as having two major aspects: the rational­ ization of the economic and political systems using technical ratio­ nality and the rationalization of social interaction and communica­ tion using hermeneutics and critical sociology. Thus Freud’s depth hermeneutics can be used to supplement and expand Marx’s cri­ tique of ideology and analysis of the social organization of produc­ tion. Freud had been able to transform Hegel’s phenomenology of the Spirit and critique of false consciousness into a utilizable cri­ tique of a distorted form of the self-constitution of the human spe­ cies in communicative action. Integrated with Marx, Freud provides a theoretical framework for understanding distorted communication and the ideological illusions of power that pervade the formation of consciousness and self-identity in modern capitalist society. Both theorists seek societies in which communication is freed from dis­ torted socialization and personality development and the domina­ tion of class and privilege. Functionalism in sociology offers a theo­ retical model for this type of causal explanation of species develop­ ment. Parsons’s structural functionalism provides Habermas with the tools for analyzing a repressive class system and the maintenance of power through technical rationality within the political, economic, and cultural systems; Freudian metapsychology provides him with an analysis of distorted ego development and the rules of inter subjective communication. Functionalism as a method integrates historical and hermeneutical sociology within a general social cri­ tique of repression and lost possibilities. At the methodological level, these insights force a reconsidera­ tion of the adequacy of hermeneutics to the complexity of the social situation: Action cannot be completely inferred from subjectively intended meanings. The empiri­ cal context of actions regulated by social norms transcends the manifest meaning of intentions and calls for an objective frame of reference in which the latent meaning of functions can be grasped; for in the final analysis, the actors’ orientation is not the same as their motives. Traditional meanings or cultural values are institutionalized and thereby gain normatively binding power over social action.83

Subjectively intended meaning cannot be the only basis for a critical hermeneutic which must include issues of objective meaning ex-

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pressed as structures and systems of power and ideology. Meaning and action can only be understood within an institutional frame­ work of language, labor, and domination. In a rationalized society, social action becomes unintended and irrational, easily manipulated by the broader social interests in functional adaptation and stability: Only when split-off motives and deeply internalized rules have been understood in their objective connection with the rational compulsions of collective self-preservation on the one hand and the irrational compulsions of superfluous authorities on the other, when they have been reconciled with subjectively meaningful motives in the minds of the acting subjects themselves, can social action develop as truly communicative action.84

A critical sociology must take into account the hermeneutical con­ text of meaning construction, but also the social context of meaning distortion. That is why the development of philosophies of meaning have been important in Western thought from phenomenology and linguistic analysis to hermeneutics. However, they must be accom­ panied by the sociological accounts of structural distortion of mean­ ing found in the writings of Marx and Freud. This requires a func­ tionalist method that can deal with social structures and integrated systems and with the systematic distortion of meaning and commu­ nication. For in systems where this occurs, human action is no longer understandable using a method of interpretive understanding. Ac­ tions and intentions have been transformed into behavioral motives and stimuli. Cultural traditions and horizons of meaning are forms of the collective unconscious characterized by the separation of real motives from overt behavior, split-off symbols and distorted com­ munication, and substitute gratification in political ideologies and utopian dreams. The human need for freedom, equality, and emancipation is reduced to market categories and consumer choices. The free choice of consumer goods in the marketplace becomes the substitute for non-distorted, democratic communication, moral au­ tonomy, individual responsibility, and critical self-reflection. Democ­ racy has been replaced by plebiscites, freedom by privatized liberty, equality by formal rights, and open communication by media dis­ cussion and consumer information. Behavior has become mechani­ cal and formal as the individual is subject to external forces by hypostatized social systems and power relations that reduce intentions to the data of observable events. The subject becomes another ob­ servable variable in a reified and alienated world of objects. This is also the cultural pre-understanding and logic behind consumer sur­ veys and trend predictions.

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Epistemological Pluralism and Methodological Integration in Critical Science In the preface to the fifth edition (1982) of his work, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, Habermas states that his approach to the phi­ losophy of the social sciences has changed. He no longer grounds it in an epistemology of consciousness or language. Rather his philo­ sophical inquiry is based on a theory of communicative action and mutual understanding. His methodological reflections on social sci­ ence are undertaken through a phenomenological and historical re­ construction of the object domain, rationality, and logic of social theory. This is important because Habermas’s philosophy of social science arises organically out of the sociological tradition of Durkheim, Mead, Marx, Weber, and Parsons and not out of the pro­ fessional subspecialization of philosophy. He probes their theories while reconstructing the logic of inquiry and objectivity that would permit such investigations. The Theory o f Communicative Action continues this analysis with special attention to Weber’s theory of rationalization and value realization (institutionalization of values), Parsons’s systems theory and structural functionalism, and a Marx­ ist theory of internal colonization of the lifeworld (personality, so­ cial institutions, and culture). By reconstructing this complex theory of society, its institutions, functions, and socialization, by reconstruct­ ing the theoretical traditions that ground this theory, Habermas philo­ sophically recreates the real object domain of sociological inquiry.85 Whereas the work, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, examines the contemporary discussions about the competing schools of meth­ odological thought within the philosophy of social science, The Theory o f Communicative Action phenomenologically reconstructs Habermas’s actual social theory from the classical tradition out of which his metatheory is derived. The two works arrive at similar conclusions but from different perspectives.86 Habermas weaves his way through the history of social theory beginning with the dichotomy between the sociological materialism of Hobbes and utilitarianism which attempted to explain the struc­ ture of social order around individual interests and instrumental ra­ tionality and the sociological idealism of Durkheim and the neoKantianism of the Southwest German School which stressed the importance of subjective meaning and cultural values when discuss­ ing action within the social system. This split continues today in the

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form of a metalanguage which characterizes the functioning of the social system and lifeworld, system integration and a theory of cul­ ture. Habermas reconnects and integrates these different traditions through a theory of rationalization and internal colonization of the lifeworld which is the symbolically structured world of intersubjectivity, communicative action, and cultural meanings. He attempts to integrate micro action theory with the macro structures of the social system within an advanced industrial society. He views the study of social action in terms of the actions of individuals and their subjectively intended meanings from two perspectives: First, within the broader context of the functioning of social structures and subsystems—economy, polity, personality and socialization, social institutions, and culture; and second, in terms of the integra­ tion and stabilization of the entire social system by means of the structural mechanisms of “system integration” and “social integra­ tion.”87 The result of the rationalization of the lifeworld is a reduc­ tion of reason to instrumental rationality and a general cultural im­ poverishment of society with a corresponding loss of traditions and meaning, anomie, and growing social and personality pathologies. The cultural values of society are embodied in social institutions and internalized in the socialized individual in the form of conscious­ ness and personality through communicative interaction. By means of cultural reproduction, internalization, and socialization, institu­ tionalized values are reproduced as value orientations and cultural patterns of the individual personality. One way the social system maintains itself is by incorporating these cultural patterns and social values in the individual. This is what Parsons and Habermas refer to as “social integration.” On the other hand, the order of the social system is also maintained by its self-regulating and self-directing ability to adapt to its immediate material and economic environment, politically allocate its scarce resources, and coordinate the special­ ized functioning of its various subsystems of social action accord­ ing to purposive-rational action. This is referred to as “functional or system integration.” Following Parsons, Habermas contends that the different forms of integration are antithetical and antagonistic, re­ sulting in compromise, repression, symptom formation, resistance, and private and public pathologies.88 “Parsons’s concept of system is of a self-regulating organism that differentiates itself from its envi­ ronment by maintaining stable boundaries conditions.”89 This self­ regulating organism functionally adapts to its surroundings along

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four structural axes or pattern variables which include the pattern maintenance of norms and values of the culture, goal attainment through politics, adaptation to the material needs and scarce resources of the economy, and integration through socialization of the person­ ality. It is through the close coordination and interaction of these subsystems in the form of cultural reproduction and social integra­ tion (culture and personal motivation) and material reproduction and system integration (economy and politics) that the social system sur­ vives and develops. Conflicts between the two realms are resolved by means of depoliticization and the functional assimilation of cul­ tural values to the imperatives of functional integration. Everything becomes subject to the logic and values of the market and political administration—rationalization. In order to accomplish the building of such a social theory, Habermas is required to rely upon various methodological approaches and epistemological traditions: the interpretive understanding of sub­ jective meaning and cultural values, the causal explanation of the structural interrelationships and workings within the social system, and a critical theory of the social pathologies of capitalism. By view­ ing society in such broad strokes, he integrates interpretive, explana­ tory, and emancipatory science, respectively into one comprehen­ sive critical social theory. To explain the workings of the social sys­ tem and the interrelationships among the economy, polity, culture, society, and personality, Habermas integrates Weber’s theory of in­ strumental and bureaucratic rationalization and scientific disenchant­ ment with Parsons’s theory of structural differentiation and repressed social pathologies. The logic of the mode of production and power domination of the state, specialization, hierarchy, and technical ra­ tionality structure our everyday life. And there is no other symbolic realm that can provide alternatives since society has been absorbed into its own system’s environment. “Reality [is] cut loose from nor­ mative ties....Organizations render themselves independent from concrete dispositions and goals...[that might] impede their steering capacity.”90 There is an indifference between social organization and social values resulting in a dehumanization of society. Society is guided by a specific type of steering mechanism based on the requirements for material reproduction, profit making, legal protection of property, and the maintenance of class power. In its earliest liberal stage, this steering mechanism was the market itself acting as a self-sufficient and self-correcting reproduction of the

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capitalist foundations of society and legitimated through private law and formal legal procedures.91 In society’s more developed form of capitalism in the twentieth century, social norms and moti­ vations are no longer supplied by ideology and ethics, but are re­ placed by nominalistic rational organization and formal law. There is a “splitting up” of morality and legality as part of the process of the uncoupling of system (economy and state) and lifeworld (cul­ ture, social institutions, and personality). The cultural and social lifeworld is in the process repressed and marginalized because its values and institutions are no longer the result of communicatively structured interaction and mutual understanding; they are now the product of the imperatives and steering of a capitalist economic system. “Elements of a private way of life and a cultural political form of life get split off from the symbolic structures of the lifeworld through the monetary redefinition of goals, relations and services, life-spaces and life-times, and through the bureaucratization of decisions, duties and rights, responsibilities and dependencies.”92 Under these conditions, the social system becomes self-enclosed and autonomous, but also deformed and pathological, resulting in a loss of meaning through bureaucratization and formal rationality and a loss of freedom through rationalization. System and power overwhelm culture and values. And the possibility for critical self­ reflection diminishes because the cultural ecology is no longer there which could nurture the development of a healthy society, strong self-identity, and vibrant community. Traditional norms, ethical values, ideologies, and metaphysical worldviews once offered individuals the opportunity to challenge authority and the steering mechanism of society in the economy and polity. Alternative directions and values were provided. But these became restrictive impositions that were eventually eliminated by the structural reduction of social to functional integration. Follow­ ing Marx, Weber, and Horkheimer, Habermas contends that meth­ odological neutrality and scientific objectivity become the mecha­ nisms by which these inconveniences to system imperatives and steer­ ing are eliminated. Social planning and scientific management, for example, Taylorism and organizational and industrial psychology, become examples of the only acceptable forms of symbolic expres­ sion in a rationalized world. The lifeworld is neutralized as a plat­ form for potential resistance and critique. “The transition from one problem area to the other is tied to a change of methodological atti-

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tude and conceptual apparatus. Functional integration cannot be adequately dealt with by way of lifeworld analysis undertaken from an internal perspective; it only comes into view when the lifeworld is objectified, that is to say, represented in an objectivating attitude as a boundary-maintaining system.”93 Rationalized modernity, reified social structures, objectified insti­ tutions, formally organized domains of purposive-rational action (bureaucracy, political administration, and economic production), class relationships, ideological distortions of reality, and their result­ ing social pathologies, cannot be adequately examined or explained using the methods of interpretive sociology and subjective action theory. The issues are beyond the capacity of Weber and Gadamer to deal with. While they were central issues in classical social theory, this is no longer the case in contemporary social theory and philoso­ phy of social science. The social system and social science have changed. In a market economy as understood by neo-classical eco­ nomics, the priorities and rationality of the self-regulating system are independent of individual intentions and beliefs. Social interac­ tion occurs not at the level of intentionality and norms, but at the level of the medium of exchange value and the laws of the market (labor theory of value). Social relationships have become reified and commodified. Habermas is in agreement with Thomas Luckmann who argues that an interpretation of the subjective meaning of ac­ tion in modernity is no longer adequate to an understanding of the objective context and structures of meaning. The former have been colonized by the latter. “The highest form of societal rationality and the most effective subsumption of acting subjects under the objec­ tive force of an apparatus operating autonomously [occurs] above their heads.”94 By combining the neo-Kantian emphasis on culture and meaning with a Marxian and Parsonian analysis of reified social structures, Habermas develops a social theory with both subjective and objec­ tive elements that require different forms of rationality and method. The different types of subjective action theory, such as phenom­ enology, hermeneutics, and symbolic interaction must be joined by historical structuralism, systems functionalism, and social critique, thereby theoretically recoupling system and lifeworld. In order to accomplish this, there must be an integration of three distinct meth­ odological approaches in sociology: (1) To investigate the nature of social roles, psychological needs, cultural values, and symbolic

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meaning necessitates an interpretive and historical method of un­ derstanding; (2) to inquire into the nature of the social system, its structures and functions, demands a method of inquiry explaining historical and causal relationships; and finally, (3) committing one­ self to a critique of social pathologies, repression, ideology, and iden­ tity distortions within the social totality directs the investigator to a synthesis of ethics and social theory. To investigate only specific parts of the social totality or to universalize one of its sociological methods results in a failure to appreciate the complex components of the social whole. Sociology inquires into the cultural and linguis­ tic reproduction of the lifeworld, as well as its contingent historical and material reproduction. After first stressing the process of rationalization and structural differentiation, Habermas introduces two other ideas: the uncoupling of system and lifeworld and the technical rationalization of the dif­ ferentiated lifeworld. His thesis is that in an advanced capitalist soci­ ety the forces of functional integration based on purposive-rational action repress the cultural values, social institutions, and individual needs necessary for communicative action and a free democratic society. However, during the early stages of the development of modernity, the positive rationalization and differentiation of culture and the lifeworld result in the institutional separation of culture, so­ ciety, and personality; the progressive broadening of reason and va­ lidity claims into cognitive (objective truth), moral and evaluative (normative rightness), and expressive (subjective sincerity or au­ thenticity) knowledge; and the differentiation of the cultural life and knowledge of the community into the scientific, religious, moral, political, and aesthetic spheres. With the evolution of the possibili­ ties inherent in differentiation and rationalization—new objects of knowledge, forms of interaction, and cultural experience—new av­ enues for self-enlightenment and expression are opened up. Unlike other critical theorists more influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Weber, Habermas is unabashed in his enthusiasm for the possi­ bilities of the Enlightenment. The crisis of modernity lies not in a dialectic of Enlightenment but in the capitalist abuse of reason. Over time differentiation turns into fragmentation as these spheres disap­ pear as autonomous realms of reflective self-development, moral enlightenment, and social critique. With the technical rationalization and uncoupling of the social system and lifeworld, the Enlighten­ ment becomes transformed into an iron cage. Self-reflection is un-

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dermined by the roles and values of possessive individualism, con­ sumerism, and utilitarianism; political participation and self-deter­ mination are undermined by administrative imperatives of system integration (capital accumulation and profit realization) and social integration (political and cultural legitimation, narcissistic develop­ ment, and repressive socialization).95 With further differentiation in advanced capitalist societies of the twentieth century through the creation of a neo-Keynesian state, mass democracy, and the social welfare system, a pliant population is cre­ ated. People are socialized to accept new roles of passive consump­ tion of consumer goods and client entitlements and privileges. What began as the Enlightenment dream of expanding ways in which in­ dividuals experience and interpret the meaning of nature, self, and society through public criticism and open discourse; what began as a broadening of the domains of reality that could open up new forms of knowledge and validity claims; and what began as an expansion of the horizons of understanding in which validity claims to truth were to be justified through intersubjectively shared values and com­ municative discussion, is turned into a means for ensuring class ef­ ficacy and industrial productivity (Zweckrationalitat).96 As society moves from the primordial mythical worldviews of superstition and dogmatism of the pre-modem world to the dreams of the Enlighten­ ment with its new forms of truth as the technical knowledge of sci­ ence, practical wisdom of morality, and the aesthetic experience of art, new possibilities of consciousness and hopes for justice and hap­ piness are revealed. New domains of reality are opened as nature, society, and the self become distinctive and autonomous realms of being with their own forms of cognitive, moral, and evaluative knowl­ edge, objectivity, and justification.97 With the creation of these au­ tonomous areas and their correspondingly distinct forms of knowl­ edge within the cultural lifeworld, understanding is no longer im­ munized from critical reflection by external religious and political authorities. Habermas calls this historical process “social rational­ ization.” Interpretations of meaning and agreement over objective facts and normative traditions now have the possibility of resulting from rational discussion and public criticism. Habermas sees in the Enlightenment the cultural possibility for a society of autonomous moral individuals based on universal moral principles within a strong community of reciprocal understanding and communication. This is what he means by discursive rationality:

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Only against the background o f an objective world, and measured against criticizable claims to truth and efficacy, can beliefs appear as systematically false, action intentions as systematically hopeless, and thoughts as fantasies, as mere imaginings. Only against the background of a normative reality that has become autonomous, and measured against the criticizable claim to normative rightness, can intentions, wishes, attitudes, feelings appear as illegitimate or merely idiosyncratic, as nongeneralizable and merely subjective.98

With this social differentiation, we are able to reflect upon an ex­ ternal and objective world of nature amenable to instrumental ratio­ nality and technical mastery; a normative social order based on intersubjective values and traditions; and a subjective world of pri­ vate experiences and self-realization. Habermas likens Weber’s theory of rationalization and social evolution to Piaget’s theory of decentered and differentiated learning and cognitive development." The de­ veloped individual is capable of distinguishing between an objec­ tive world of empirical facts, a social world of valid norms and be­ liefs, and an ego with subjective experiences. Each area heightens our ability of concept formation, construction of reality, and self­ reflection thereby expanding our learning and self-consciousness. Historically, this potential for a cultural rationalization of the lifeworld lay in the confluence of complex social forces of the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, and Enlightenment. There was a separation and growing autonomy of morality and formal legal rationality; sci­ ence, too, was freeing itself from ancient cosmologies and religious worldviews based on sacred traditions and revelation. New areas or forms of life were created which formalized these changes, such as the appearance of a devalued world and transcendent God with an ethics of inner-worldly asceticism, calling, and conviction, an an­ thropology of possessive individualism, and the theoretical and prac­ tical mastery and calculation over an objectified and profane envi­ ronment through the techniques of science, morality, and law. New forms of consciousness and culture were created that permitted whole new questions along with their corresponding need for rational jus­ tification about the nature of being, truth, justice, and beauty. And in the process, new cultural values, historical traditions, and social dreams were created. “As soon as science, morality and art have been differentiated into autonomous spheres of values, each under one universal validity claim—truth, normative rightness, authentic­ ity or beauty—objective advances, improvements, enhancements become possible in a sense specific to each.”100 The key for Habermas is that the validity claims of these new spheres of rationality were

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part of the cultural values and shared traditions that “call not merely for reasoning in general, but for reasons in a form of argumentation typical of each.” 101 This presupposed an implied theory of argu­ mentation and discourse which could establish the truth, rightness, or truthfulness of their different claims to validity. That is, a speaker could articulate, if requested, a discursive justification or good argu­ ment for any cognitive, moral, or aesthetic statement. Later, Habermas will internalize these structural developments of the Enlightenment so that the different validity claims become the assumed presuppo­ sition of all attempts at understanding and communication within scientific and moral discourse. In the end, these potential forms of relation to nature, self, and society, these new expressions of human reason were eclipsed by the more powerful economic and administrative imperatives of capi­ talist rationalization. Capitalism overwhelmed and subsumed its cul­ tural and institutional possibilities in order to further its own sur­ vival. The potential existed for greater mastery over nature, increased understanding of culturally shared values and traditions, and more phenomenologically developed self-consciousness, that is, increased material production, political democracy, and individual self-fulfill­ ment. However, in modern society historical developments took a different turn and culture became relevant only to the extent that it could validate a particular and narrow form of rationality (Zweckrationalität) that enhanced only system integration. The re­ sult is that the lifeworld is turned into a desolate wasteland further isolating the individual in a contemptuous narcissism, private con­ sumerism, and moral nihilism.102 What Rorty praises as the ideal of ironic liberalism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Habermas views as a further rationalization of the iron cage. As with Weber, there is a loss of meaning in a world stripped of cultural substance and universal values. The system’s need for further pro­ duction, accumulation, and stability has resulted in increased ratio­ nalization and disenchantment of the culture and individuals. The development of cultural rationalism and a public arena based on communicative interaction, intersubjectively shared values, his­ torically mediated traditions, and general understanding and agree­ ment (Verständigung) is overwhelmed by the system imperatives of capital accumulation, political control, and cultural legitimation of the modern welfare state. Power and domination overwhelm lan­ guage, self-enlightenment, and the rationality of discourse in a dis-

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tortion and degeneration of culture. “Under the selective pressure of the system imperatives of capitalist modernization, social rational­ ization did in fact take place in a one-sided, distorted and crisisridden way.”103 Repression of values and meaning transforms cul­ ture into a form of system integration. The demands of the economic and administrative system—monopoly capital and the welfare state— encroach upon and consequently transform the cultural values, so­ cial institutions, socialization process, and ego development into distorted ideological forms whose purpose is to serve the needs of system integration, crisis avoidance, and social stability. This is ex­ pressed in the continuing social contradictions between capitalism and democracy, capital accumulation and cultural legitimation. In capitalism, individuals are treated as passive recipients of economic and political goods, that is, as consumers and clients, whereas in a democracy they are active participants as citizens and producers. The possibility of an active public role of citizens in modem society is neutralized by bureaucratic rationality and mass loyalty as “priva­ tized hopes for self-actualization and self-determination are prima­ rily located in the roles of consumer and client.”104 According to Habermas, the attempts to avoid conflicts between functional and social integration and to repress any consciousness of their structural incompatibility result in the malformation and tech­ nical rationalization of cultural values of science (truth), morality (justice), and art (beauty); the distorted development of personality and self-identity through the mechanisms of need repression, con­ sumerism, and narcissism; and the social pathologies of alienation, disenchantment, and anomie. Theories about objective nature be­ come means for domination and control; ideas about justice become expressions of market rationality, consumer choice, and utilitarian nominalism; democracy becomes a stage for mass loyalty and politi­ cal leadership; and forms of beauty become images for consumer en­ ticement and exorbitant profitability. Economic criteria and administra­ tive efficiency provide the bases for decisions affecting family devel­ opment, ecological issues, political choices, social problems, and education and health care issues as the lifeworld adapts to the organi­ zational and system needs of capitalism. More and more areas of society fall into the black hole of the logic and rationality of bureau­ cratic instrumentality and economic efficiency and productivity. In the end, capitalist development structurally requires the repres­ sion of the cultural values of social justice, aesthetics, democracy

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and freedom, and self-realization and personal fulfillment since they must ultimately be transformed into aspects for further rational man­ agement and bureaucratic integration within the social system. They no longer have a transcendent character, or provide a utopian di­ mension, or offer hopes and ideals for individual and social devel­ opment—dreams of the future are dead. They no longer act as tradi­ tional forms of legitimation or ideology. Their sole purpose is to integrate further the individual into a stable, self-regulating society. But conflict resolution is illusory in an unstable society as culture main­ tains its independence in face of “the functional imperatives of system maintenance.”105 In a stable society, however, there is a splitting-off of concepts and reality so that there can be no conceptualization possible of the repressed social ideals. This, in turn, is expressed for Habermas in the rationalization of methods and the disappearance from critical reflection of this very process of societal rationalization. Positivism is just another form of rationalization and repression. This is what ulti­ mately necessitates his involvement in issues of methodology and the philosophy of social science. The integration of Parsons’s theory of structural differentiation and systems theory with Weber’s theory of rationalization is made necessary in order to explain how in an advanced capitalist society the welfare state suppresses and con­ tains class conflict through the reification of communicative action in the lifeworld and its subsystems of culture (values), personality (socialization), and social institutions (norms). The intersubjective world of cultural meaning becomes a liability in the process of establishing system maintenance because there is always a danger of a self-consciousness of disparities and contra­ dictions between social ideals and reality. To forestall any possible system crisis caused by social integration and functional integration moving in contradictory directions, the former is displaced and sub­ sumed into the latter. Culture, as the arena of socially discussed and confirmed validity claims and shared norms and values, is integrated into purposive-rational action as a mechanism for directly stabiliz­ ing the economy and state. It is based on the logic and steering im­ peratives of the economy—efficiency, productivity, and profitabil­ ity—and the state—bureaucratic power and domination. The class structure of modem capitalism assimilates and devalues the validity claims, intersubjective consensus, and cultural values under the func­ tional requirements of system stability, bureaucratic rationality, and profit-making. The transcendent and potentially critical dimension

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of the lifeworld and culture are lost as they become transformed into another component for social control and administrative adjustments. The result is a growing instrumentalization, rationalization, and technologizing of the lifeworld in which cultural autonomy is re­ placed by the increasing adaptation of social ideals to the steering mechanism and imperatives of the social system. The social institu­ tions of education, mass media, political life, law, etc., are not geared to the enlightenment of individuals but to their gradual and uncriti­ cal integration into the social system.106 This is the unflattering pic­ ture of Nietzsche’s last man: The capitalist pattern o f modernization is marked by a deformation, a reification of the symbolic structures of the lifeworld under the imperatives o f subsystems differentiated out via money and power and rendered self-sufficient....! am referring here to the deformations that inevitably turn up when forms of economic and administrative ratio­ nality encroach upon areas o f life whose internal communicative structures cannot be rationalized according to those criteria.107

Habermas accepts the implications of Weber’s thesis of rational­ ization that this process leads to a loss of both meaning and freedom for the individual. The deformation of society caused by structural uncoupling and differentiation according to the logic of technical reason results in various forms of social pathologies. It creates a nominalist world of subjective rationality incapable of making moral and political judgments, autonomous will-formation, or social criti­ cisms because of the transformation of reason from an objective or substantive rationality to a subjective or formal rationality. The sys­ tem imperatives of economics replace ethics and political wisdom as the prevailing form of social rationality. Reason is perverted into nominalism and relativism, the public sphere of democracy disap­ pears, communicative action is systematically distorted and absorbed into the functional integration of the welfare state and corporate bu­ reaucracy, and the lifeworld is internally colonized. Personality, so­ cial institutions, and cultural values—the private and public world— become deformed as they are no longer based on a symbolically structured reality of communicative action, but on the demands of the social system for survival and stability. Habermas’s thesis is that the colonization of the lifeworld split-off the moral and political di­ mensions of the private and public spheres of life resulting in cul­ tural impoverishment, personalities based on artificially created needs, and a deformed democracy of competition, utilitarian con­ sumption, and self-absorption, on the one hand, and authoritarianism

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on the other. Life appears meaningless as individuals and families search for purpose in a narcissistic culture of hollowing consump­ tion and dulling hedonism. In late capitalism it becomes more and more difficult and com­ plex to maintain continued administrative integration and stability. Class and institutional tensions within the social system are trans­ formed into political issues. There is an attempt at the rational and administrative pacification of class conflict through state interven­ tionism, mass democracy, and the social policies of the welfare state. But these do not eliminate the problems. They are only displaced from the economy to the social-welfare state as they reappear in the anonymous and neutral forms of fiscal crisis, depoliticization and neutralization of participatory democracy and citizenship, and le­ gitimation crisis, respectively. “The welfare state (Sozialstaat) [pro­ vides] for the pacification of the sphere of social labor and the neu­ tralization of participation in political decision making processes.”108 Traditional bourgeois ideals of democracy, participation, equal­ ity, and freedom become unimportant. In turn, society displaces and immunizes critical reason from self-reflection as consciousness and ideology are also displaced by instrumental and functionalist ratio­ nality. In its attempt to remedy social problems caused by capital accumulation and industrial production, the welfare state has diffi­ culty maintaining high levels of public expenditures for both eco­ nomic growth and social programs.109 Government funding for eco­ nomic advancement creates the need for more social welfare spend­ ing at the same time that there is difficulty paying for these pro­ grams (fiscal crisis) and delivering the promised entitlements (legiti­ mation crisis). The use of state resources and direct government in­ tervention through taxation and fiscal policy to advance capital ac­ cumulation intensifies class inequality resulting in further displaced crises. The government needs to intervene in more and more social institutions of the lifeworld by means of technical experts, social services, and legal entitlements—education, family and parental privi­ leges, workplace, ecology, medicine, etc.—in order to maintain a stable system environm ent.110 Habermas calls this a “therapeutocracy” as the welfare state moves out from the regula­ tion of production and democracy to new forms of pacification in the private sphere. It continues to split-off the public and private spheres from the cultural values, social norms, and democratic willformation from which they originally derived. In the process of ad-

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ministratively controlling the lifeworld and separating it from its criti­ cal and utopian dimensions, rationalization promotes cultural im­ poverishment, disintegration of the lifeworld, and an immiseration of meaning. Culture, society, and personality have become new forms of abstract labor divorced from use value and human needs. Universal Pragmatics, Discourse Ethics, and Structural Critique of Capitalism Traditional dialectics involved an immanent critique of the his­ torical and logical contradictions between technology and society. It centered around the contradictory relationships between the produc­ tive forces (technology and social organization) and social relations of production (class and ideology). Immanent critique revealed the contradictory structural forces along with the tension between the ideological claims of capitalism and their utopian potential for soci­ ety.111 Either the irrational class structure inhibited the rational ap­ plication of the material foundations of society to alleviate inequal­ ity, poverty, and alienation (Communist Manifesto) or the social ide­ ology of liberalism based on equality and freedom could not be re­ alized within the capitalist relations of production (Capital). But with the structural transformation of advanced industrial society, capital­ ism is no longer legitimated by political liberalism but by techno­ logical rationality itself. This creates a self-enclosed feedback sys­ tem in which the legitimation of domination occurs through the ra­ tionalization of science and technology. By this means, there is less likelihood of a contradiction between the cultural values and social relationships, on the one hand, and the productive forces on the other. In addition to the structural changes between the productive forces and social relations of production, there are also philosophical argu­ ments against the Enlightenment project of epistemology and social critique. The challenge to epistemology as a first philosophy found in Hegel and the post-analytic philosophy of Quine, Kuhn, and Rorty has forced Habermas to rethink the nature of truth and the tradi­ tional grounding of knowledge in experience and thought.112 Thus, the structural and institutional changes of modernity, the inapplica­ bility of immanent critique, and the philosophical rejection of foundationalism require Habermas to ground his social critique in a new method—a transcendental philosophy of language and the ideal speech situation in which the normative values and ideals of truth,

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freedom, moral autonomy, equality, and social justice are presup­ posed in the basic form of discursive rationality and public dis­ course.113 “The basic categories of critical theory are presupposed in communication.”114 Rick Roderick outlines the fundamental ele­ ments of Habermas’s theory of communication in his universal prag­ matics (communicative competence and the ideal speech situation), ego and moral development, critique of ideology, and historical materialism and theory of rationalization.115 The method of critique has evolved from its initial epistemological examination of the uni­ versal and necessary conditions of knowledge and the limits of con­ cepts of the understanding in Kant to the dialectical development of the concept (Begriff) as Absolute Spirit and the logic of capital with Hegel and Marx, respectively. Phenomenological and dialectic self­ reflection in Hegel becomes a critique of ideology and false con­ sciousness in Marx. Having already rejected foundationalism, claims to truth for theo­ retical and practical reason must be adjudicated and justified through a community consensus (epistemological reconstruction) within an open and free society permitting uncoerced discussion and debate (social critique).116 This consensus theory of truth presupposes a whole host of linguistic (universal pragmatics) and institutional (ideal speech situation) assumptions that transcendentally require demo­ cratic participation and rational discussion. Habermas argues that every utterance in a speech act makes four transcendental validity claims which assume that the spoken sentence is grammatically com­ prehensible (Verständlichkeit) and true (Wahrheit), the utterance is normatively right (Richtigkeit), and the intentions of the speaker are truthful and sincere (Wahrhaftigkeit). “The goal of coming to an understanding (Verständigung) is to bring about an agreement (Einverständnis) that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual truth, and ac­ cord with one another.”117 Thus, underlying all cognitive and moral claims to truth are universal and normative assumptions about the world, social interaction and norms, and subjective expressions and authenticity. In the social sphere, the “ideal speech situation” is characterized by the following: at least two individuals, who are capable of speech, come together to discuss a state of affairs; each is allowed to intro­ duce any ideas or proposals and call into question the ideas of oth­ ers; each is allowed to express his or her ideas, attitudes, wishes, and

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needs; agreement is to be based on mutual recognition and the force of a better argument; there must be no hindrances to individuals coming together to discuss issues, that is, there must be no institu­ tional, structural, or personality constraints on individual participa­ tion and discussion; and, finally, there must be a symmetrical distri­ bution of power and opportunities to express ideas.118 One of the crucial assumptions presupposed by cognition is a critical theory of capitalism and an implicit theory of social justice.119 The universal and normative assumptions that underlie all communicative action, participatory democracy, and public discourse provide Habermas with the sociological foundations for a critique of the uncoupling of social institutions, repression of ideas, needs, and split-off symbols, technical rationalization of the lifeworld, reduction of social integra­ tion to the needs of capitalist integration, disappearance of the pub­ lic sphere, systematically distorted communication, the colonization and cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld, and the resulting per­ sonality and social pathologies of modernity. The interests behind an emancipation of the individual from class oppression toward a free society are based on the traditional values of German Idealism and Marxian philosophy—individual autonomy, self-determination, freedom, equality, and social justice. A critical science, therefore, requires a diverse appreciation of the different logics and procedures within a critical sociology—ex­ planatory, hermeneutic, and emancipatory science. In his early work, Habermas investigated the interests and values hidden in positivism, hermeneutics, and critical theory. In his later work, he continues to trace the relationship between knowledge and values, but now hid­ den in the normative assumptions that underlie all communicative action. He has not yet worked out the systematic relationship be­ tween his theory of universal pragmatics and ideal types with a macro theory of the structures of political economy and distorted commu­ nication—the relationship between the lifeworld and the social sys­ tem. But he has attempted to put the critical voice of reason back into the social sciences and this alone may well be his major contri­ bution to the development of Western thought. Habermas has been able to integrate functional, hermeneutic, and emancipatory sociology into a comprehensive social theory and methodology, thereby integrating interpretive and cultural sociol­ ogy with explanatory sociology. Since his methodology is a recon­ struction and reflection upon his social theory, there is a better and

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clearer connection between the two. Though the epistemologies and philosophies of social science that ground their differences are in­ compatible, Habermas is able to see a broader compatibility at the level of social theory. In capitalist societies characterized by reification and rationalization, functionalism becomes a way of explaining, but not justifying, human behavior that does not exclude other method­ ological explanations and possibilities. In societies in which indi­ viduals are treated as marketable things, functionalism does not pro­ vide an ontology or picture of an unchanging reality, only a recog­ nition of the limits of human intentions and actions. It helps articu­ late a society in which individuals are caught in a deterministic uni­ verse of purposive-rational action and functionally integrated sub­ systems. Like Weber, Habermas has been unable to pull together other com­ ponents of his thought, such as the integration of his empirical and sociological analyses with his metatheoretical reflections on social science; nor has he been able to examine the technical details of the logic and method of sociological inquiry. There has been no attempt to resolve the conflicting philosophical interests underlying the dif­ ferent claims to knowledge and truth of the various sociological and philosophical schools of thought. Each has a different form of ratio­ nality, objectivity, and logic of inquiry and they have yet to be rec­ onciled at the epistemological level. As in the case with Weber, there has also been no attempt to integrate Habermas’s early transcenden­ tal and Kantian writings with his later more phenomenological and Hegelian works. That is, Habermas leaves unanswered questions about the relation between his theory of language, universal prag­ matics, communicative competence, and ideal speech situation and his later phenomenological reconstruction of the history of theoreti­ cal consciousness and forms of rationality.120 He does not adequately connect his theory of non-distorted communication with his critique of ideology. There must be further clarification of the relation be­ tween his theory of pragmatic reconstruction and his theory of so­ cial critique in order to show how universal pragmatics and the ideal speech situation can be used as the basis for a critique of modernity and distorted communication.121 Habermas does not provide adequate justification for his theory of cognitive interests and the ecological split between nature and human beings, between instrumental ratio­ nality and technological interests and communicative action.122 Fi­ nally, he also does not provide an analysis of social praxis. That is,

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he never articulates the concrete, historical possibilities of the public sphere or the possibilities for social change within the present set of social institutions. Though he searches for an alternative grounding of truth in dis­ cursive rationality and discourse ethics, a rediscovery of the public sphere and participatory democracy, and a critique of the growing depoliticization and rationalization of politics, it remains unclear where the basis for his ethical and political critique of capitalism lies. If it lies in distorted communication and personality develop­ ment, colonization of the lifeworld, rationalization of culture, disap­ pearance of the public, and economic exploitation is his critique based on the distortion and repression of the universal values of the ideal speech situation, immanent critique of the political and cul­ tural ideals of society, or the collective wisdom within the phenom­ enological history of sociological theories? How are ethics and sci­ ence to be integrated into a comprehensive social critique?123 Habermas appears in his later writings to drop language, the ideal speech situation, and social consensus as ideals for social justice and the good life, as well as the foundation for his critical theory. But in the process he never resolves the question of the new role of communicative action and communicative rationality in his thought. Does it provide a transcendental and normative standard for his cri­ tique of modernity as a form of distorted rationality as Roderick argues, or is it simply a descriptive and empirical category as Tho­ mas McCarthy maintains?124 Do the norms for social critique lie in an adjusted and more limited transcendental consensus theory or in a phenomenological reconstruction of the sociological theories of distorted rationality and social pathologies in modem society? What­ ever remains to be accomplished by Habermas must be measured against his enormous achievement of expanding our understanding of the nature of methods, objectivity, and values in sociological in­ quiry. He recognizes that a narrow definition of science can only lead to a false objectivism and naturalism, lost epistemological tra­ ditions, repressed ideas, and misplaced possibilities for human eman­ cipation. At a time which has been characterized as a period of the “de­ composition of sociology”; at a time when social theory has been reduced to testable hypotheses and clarification of method; at a time when the character of science and range of social theory has been reduced to an instrumental rationality and unreflective positivism;

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and at a time when sociology defines itself more narrowly by sepa­ rating itself from philosophy and history, Habermas’s reflections on the philosophy of social science are a ray of hope as he broadens the foundations of social theory to include alternative forms of rational­ ity, science, and objectivity. He has rediscovered the depth of social thought and the philosophical traditions that have given it birth; he has rediscovered culture, history, and structure. He has provided us with a foundation for social critique and hope for the future. Finally, Habermas has also helped us recognize that when epis­ temology is displaced by a philosophy of science of naturalism and positivism; when functional questions about the system of po­ litical economy and the structures of power and domination are repressed; when historical inquiry into the development of mod­ ern social institutions and social pathologies is lost; and when hermeneutical issues of cultural values and political ideals are for­ gotten, social science becomes ideology. Science loses its ability for epistemological self-reflection and conceptual analysis of the fundamental issues of the human condition. With the banishment of philosophy from sociology, epistemology from methods, with the rationalization of the cultural and historical sciences, we can think neither about our past nor our future. We have lost the ability to articulate the real prospects for self-realization, a moral economy, and democratic community. Sociological traditions, ideas, and theo­ ries are repressed and reason is silenced. Habermas’s search for these misplaced methods and forgotten dreams is a noble intellec­ tual venture and a good beginning for the revitalization of sociol­ ogy in the twenty-first century. Notes 1.

Thomas McCarthy, The C r itic a l T h eo ry o f Jürgen H a b e r m a s (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1981), summarizes the development within the critical method from Kant to Hegel as the “radicalization of the critique of knowledge” (p. 103). “Philosophical reflection on the subjective conditions of knowledge took the form of a phenomenological self-reflection on the genesis of the knowing and willing subject.” See also Garbis Kortian, M e ta critiq u e : The P h ilo s o p h ic a l A r g u ­ m en t o f J ü rgen H a b e r m a s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 93-94. With the reduction of knowledge to observation, experience is limited in scope to what is immediately given in a reified object. Positivism has lost the ability to deal with objects beyond observation and description: history, culture, values, and the emancipatory possibilities inherent in the social formation (p. 53), as well as the ability to reflect on epistemology and the conditions of knowledge (pp. 65 and 58). The danger here is that social science will be reconstructed on the basis of the laws of capitalist production and domination o f nature (p. 72).

328 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Rogers Brubaker, The L im its o f R a tio n a lity : A n E ssa y on th e S o c ia l a n d M o r a l T hough t o f M a x W eber (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), especially the introduction and chapter one, pp. 1-48. For a brief analysis of Habermas’s sociology of science and theory of rationaliza­ tion, see his summaries of Joachim Ritter and Helmut Schelsky in On th e L o g ic o f the S o c ia l S c ie n c e s , trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry Stark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 17-23, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o z ia lw iss e n sc h a fte n : M a te ria lie n (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), pp. 92-99. Habermas makes the connection in his epistemological self-reflection between these quasi-transcendental conditions for human existence and species development (work, language, and domination), their corresponding three distinct areas of cognitive development (instrumental science, hermeneutics, and critical theory), and their normative interests for technical control, communicative understanding, and human emancipation. David Held, Introduction to C ritical Theory: H orkheim er to H a berm as (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 319. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The M e th o d o l­ o g y o f the S o c ia l S c ien ce s , trans. and ed. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), p. 110, and “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in G e sa m m elte A u fsä tze zu r W issen sch aftsleh re , ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], p. 213; and Jürgen Habermas, The T h e o ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 1: R e a so n a n d th e R a tio n a liz a tio n o f S o c ie ty , trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 143, and T h e o r i e d e s k o m m u n i k a t iv e n H a n d e l n s , v o l. 1: H a n d lu n g sra tio n a litä t un d g esellsch a ftlich e R a tio n a lisieru n g (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), p. 207. Jürgen Habermas, L eg itim a tio n C risis , trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), and L eg itim a tio n sp ro b lem e im S p ä tk a p ita lism u s (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973). Jürgen Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H um an In te re sts , trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Bos­ ton: Beacon Press, 1971), p. vii, and E rken n tn is u n d In teresse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), p. 9. John Thompson, C ritic a l H erm en eu tics: A S tu d y in the T h ou gh ts o f P a u l R ic o e u r a n d Jürgen H a b erm a s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), rejects the philosophers of social science, such as Melden, Peters, Dray, Winch, and Louch, who make sharp distinctions between understanding and explanation (pp. 154-56). Habermas, O n th e L o g ic o f th e S o c ia l S c ie n c e s , p. 23, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o zia lw issen sc h a ften , p. 100. Mary Hesse, “Science and Objectivity,” in H a b erm a s: C r itic a l D e b a te s , ed. John Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 101-05 and 108, and Trent Schroyer, “Toward a Critical Theory for Advanced Industrial Soci­ ety,” in R ecen t S o c io lo g y N o. 2: P a ttern s o f C o m m u n ica tive B e h a v io r, ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 210-34. Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H u m an I n te re sts , p. 11, and E rken n tn is u n d In te re sse, p. 20. Ibid., p. vii, and E rken n tn is u n d In te re sse, p. 9. Kortian, M e ta critiq u e , p. 80. Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H u m an In terests, p. 19, and E rken n tn is u n d In te re sse, p. 29. Ibid., p. 31, and E rken n tn is u n d In teresse, p. 44. Ibid., p. 28, and E rken n tn is u n d In teresse, p. 39. Ibid., p. 34, and E rken n tn is u n d In teresse, p. 47. Ibid., p. 36, and E rken n tn is u n d In te re ss e , p. 50.

Reintegrating Science and Ethics 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

329

Seyla Benhabib, C ritiq u e , N o rm , a n d U to p ia : A S tu d y o f th e F o u n d a tio n s o f C r i t ic a l T h e o r y (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), and Kortian, M e t a c r itiq u e , pp. 94-100. Kortian emphasizes that the purpose of Habermas’s critique of Marx is to establish the legitimacy o f a sociological foundation o f know ledge in both social interaction (language, comm unication, and search for self-consciousness) and labor (instrumental activity o f production) that has its origins in H egel’s P h e n o m e n o lo g y o f S p ir it. This distinction has im ­ portant m ethodological im plications for Habermas because spheres o f action and know ledge attributed to labor and communication have different object domains, logics o f inquiry, forms of rationality, and methods o f social science. Habermas has justified the need to consider the natural and social sciences from different perspectives (p. 98). See also Anthony Giddens, “Labor and Interaction,” in H a b e r m a s : C r i t ic a l D e b a te s , ed. John Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), who argues that Habermas’s re­ thinking o f the relationship between Hegel and Marx, hermeneutics and posi­ tivism , and his analysis o f the positivist strain in M arx’s thought represent important contributions to contemporary social theory (p. 155). However, Giddens rejects making interaction and comm unicative action synonym ous and also questions Habermas’s reduction o f the structural contradictions of capitalism to simply system problems— reducing Marx to Parsons (p. 160). On the issue o f Marx’s positivism , see Albrecht Wellmer, C r i t ic a l T h e o r y o f S o c i e t y , trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), pp. 67119, and K r itis c h e G e s e lls c h a f ts th e o r ie u n d P o s itiv is m u s (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), pp. 69-127. McCarthy, The C r itic a l T h e o ry o f Jürgen H a b e rm a s, p. 18. Thompson, C r itic a l H e rm e n e u tic s, pp. 101-02. Thompson is quite aware of the methodological implications of Habermas’s theory of social action and evolution: ‘To abandon causal explanation is simultaneously to ignore those dimensions in the social world which determine and distort the medium of language and tradition, namely the dimensions of labor and power” (p. 107). Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H u m an In terests, pp. 44 and 42, respectively, and E rk en n tn is u n d In teresse, pp. 60 and 58, respectively. Kortian, M e ta critiq u e , p. 101. Alvin Gouldner, The C om in g C risis o f W estern S o c io lo g y (New York: Avon Books, 1970), pp. 65-73. Brubaker, The L im its o f R a tio n a lity , pp. 2-5. Jürgen Habermas, “The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion,” in T ow ard a R a tio n a l S o ciety: S tu den t P rotest, Science, a n d P olitics, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Bos­ ton: Beacon Press, 1979), p. 75, and “Verwissenschaftlichte Politik und öffentliche Meinung,” in T echn ik u n d W issen sch a ft a ls ‘I d e o l o g ie ’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), pp. 138-39. Herbert Marcuse, “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber,” in N eg a tio n s: E ssa ys in C ritic a l T heory, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 201-226, and “Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus im Werk Max We­ bers,” K u ltu r u n d G esellsch aft, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 107-29; and Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” in T o w a rd a R a tio n a l S o c iety : S tu d en t P ro test, S cien ce, a n d P o litic s, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 81-122, and “Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie,’” in Technik u n d W issen sch aft a ls ‘I d e o lo g ie ,’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), pp. 48-103. Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” p. 82, and T echnik u n d W issen sc h a fta ls ‘I d e o lo g ie , ’ p. 49.

330 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Jürgen Habermas, T h eory a n d P r a c tic e , trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), chaps. 1 and 2, pp. 41-120, and T h eo rie u n d P ra x is: S o zia lp h ilo so p h is c h e S tu d ien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), pp. 48-127. Karl Marx, C a p ita l: A C ritiqu e o f P o litica l E co n o m y , vol. 1: The P ro c ess o f C a p ita l­ is t P ro d u c tio n , ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 71-73. Through all of this there remained in the nineteenth century remnants of traditional values. Without them immanent critique would have been impossible. At the end o f part II of C a p ita l on simple circulation of commodities and market exchange, Marx briefly outlined the utopian elements of natural rights theory and utilitarianism with their belief in free­ dom, equality, and happiness (p. 176). Haberm as, L e g i t i m a t i o n C r i s i s , p. 30, and L e g i t i m a t i o n s p r o h l e m e im S p ä tk a p ita lism u s, p. 48. Habermas, “The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion,” p. 67, and Technik u n d W issen sch aft a ls ‘I d e o lo g ie ,’ p. 128. Joseph Schumpeter, C a p ita lism , S o c ia lism a n d D e m o c r a c y (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950); C. B. Macpherson, The T h eory o f P o sse ss iv e In d ivid u a lism : H o b b e s to L ocke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) and The L ife a n d T im es o f L ib e r a l D e m o c r a c y (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Peter Bachrach, The T h eo ry o f D e m o c r a tic E litism : A C ritiq u e (Boston: Little, Brown and Com­ pany, 1967); and Thomas Spragens, The Irony o f L ib e ra l R e a so n (Chicago: Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 1981). Jürgen Habermas and N iklas Luhmann, T h e o r ie d e r G e s e l l s c h a f t o d e r S o z ia lte c h n o lo g ie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971). For an overview of the Habermas-Luhmann debate, see Thomas McCarthy, The C r itic a l T h eo ry o f Jü rg en H a b e r m a s , pp. 213-32, and Robert Holub, Jü rgen H a b erm a s: C ritic in the P u b lic S p h ere (London: Routledge, 1991), chapter 5, pp. 106-32. Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” pp. 103-04, and Technik u n d W issen sch a ft a ls ‘I d e o lo g ie ,’ p. 78. For an analysis of the tensions between system and social integration, capitalism and democracy, see Thomas McCarthy, “Complexity and Democracy: The Seducements o f Systems Theory,” in Id e a ls a n d Illu sion s: O n R e co n stru c tio n a n d D e c o n stru c tio n in C o n te m p o r a ry C ritic a l T h eo ry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 162-63. Habermas, “Scientization o f Politics and Public Opinion,” pp. 70 and 99, re­ spectively, and T ech n ik u n d W issen sc h a ft a ls ‘I d e o l o g i e pp. 131 and 72, respec­ tively. Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” p. 105, and T echnik u n d W issen sc h a fta ls ‘I d e o lo g ie ,’ p. 81. Habermas, T h e o ry a n d P r a c tic e , pp. 262-63, and T h eo rie u n d P r a x is , pp. 315-16. Ibid., pp. 8-9, and T h eo rie u n d P ra x is , p. 16. Ibid., p. 264, and T h eo rie u n d P ra x is, p. 317. Gerard Radnitzky, C on tem porary Schools o f M etascience, vol. 2: C ontinental Schools o f M e ta sc ie n c e (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), pp. 20-22. Radnitzky, C o n te m p o r a ry S c h o o ls o f M e ta sc ie n c e, vol. 2, p. 22. Habermas, in The T h eo ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 1, outlines the fundamental traditions from which he derives his methodology and theory of communication action: Gadamer’s critical hermeneutics, Mead’s symbolic interaction, Wittgenstein’s language games, Austin’s speech actions, Piaget’s developmental psychology, Schutz’s phenom­ enology, and Garfinkers ethnomethodology (p. 95, and T h e o rie d e s kom m unikativen H a n d e ln s, vol. 1, p. 143). Also see Karl-Otto Apel, A n a ly tic P h ilo s o p h y o f L a n ­ g u a g e a n d the G eistesw issen sch a ften , trans. H. Holstelilie (Dordrecht: Reidel Pub-

Reintegrating Science and Ethics

44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

331

lishers, 1967) and T ow ards a T ran sform ation o f P h ilo so p h y , trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). For a historical overview of the development of the theory of Verstehen, see William Outhwaite, U n d ersta n d in g S o c ia l L ife: The M e th o d C a lle d Verstehen (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975). Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H um an I n te re sts, p. 176, and E rken n tn is u n d In teresse, p. 221. Stephen White, The R e ce n t W ork o f Ju rgen H a b erm a s: R e a so n , Ju stice a n d M o ­ d e r n ity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), points out the limits of Peter Winch’s theory of contextual rationality found in his work The Id ea o f S o c ia l S c ien ce (1958). This also represents a general critique of phenomenology, existen­ tialism, symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, philosophy of language, etc.: “His [Winch’s] basic argument can be summed up in the claim that the meaning and rational­ ity of an action are derived from understanding its role in relation to the prevailing norms and beliefs of the form of life of which it is a part....it [contextual rationality] nevertheless carries with it some limitations and disturbing implications for social theories and political philosophers, at least insofar as they wish to give some account of the concepts of power, ideology and social change...”(pp. 18-19). White is critical of Winch because his philosophy of social science does not include discussion about issues of social conflict and structural domination, nor does he leave open the possibil­ ity of dealing with issues of social justice and universal morality. Thomas McCarthy’s account of Habermas in “Philosophy and Critical Theory: A Reprise,” in C r itic a l T h eo ry, with David Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), stresses just these miss­ ing elements. He places Habermas within this general discussion when he writes: “It is, in fact, possible to read Habermas’s extensive writings on politics and society as a protracted examination of the cultural, psychological, and institutional precon­ ditions of and barriers to the historical embodiment of practical reason” (p. 55). Habermas, T h eo ry a n d P ra c tic e , p. 261, and T h eo rie u n d P ra x is, pp. 314-315. McCarthy, “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in C r itic a l T h eo ry, with David Hoy, pp. 83-84, and Held, In tro d u ctio n to C ritic a l T h eory, pp. 319-24. Habermas, T h eo ry a n d P ra c tic e , p. 12, and T h eo rie u n d P ra x is, p. 19. Radnitzky writes that since the classical humanism of the Renaissance, there has been a close relationship between philology and v e rsteh en d e historiography. This connection was made more explicitly by the users of the historical method in Ger­ many, including Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Ranke, Schleiermacher, Boeckh, and J. Droysen. It was picked-up by Hegel and Croce and found its way into the writings of Collingwood, Dray, and Donagan. See Radnitzky, C o n te m p o r a ry S c h o o ls o f M e ta sc ie n c e , vol. 2, p. 94. For interesting reading which goes beyond this discussion o f historical sociology, see Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision a n d M e th o d in H isto ric a l S o c io lo g y (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Harvey Kaye, The B ritish M a rx ist H istorian s: A n In tro d u ctory A n a ly sis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); and Robert Alford, The C ra ft o f In quiry: T h eories , M eth o d s , E v id e n c e (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Radnitzky, C o n te m p o r a ry S c h o o ls o f M e ta sc ie n c e , vol. 2, p. 95. Radnitzky warns that one must be very careful with this issue o f historical explanation, because of the “general ahistorical attitude of analytic philosophy...with [its] general lack of interest in the problems o f historical knowledge and historical consciousness...” (pp. 10102). See also KoulaMellos, “Habermas’s Theory of Knowledge-Constitutive Inter­ ests and the Assumption of the Hegelian-Marxist Notion of ‘Historical Reason,”’ P h ilo s o p h y a n d C u ltu re, vol. 2, ed. Venant Cauchy (Montreal: Editions Mont­ morency, 1988), p. 905.

332 53. 54. 55.

56.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H um an In te re sts, p. 147, and E rkenn tnis u n d In te re sse , p. 187. Wilhelm Dilthey, quoted in Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H u m an In te re sts , p. 149, and E rk en n tn is u n d In te re ss e , p. 189. Jürgen Habermas, The T h eory o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 2: L ife w o rld a n d S ystem : A C ritiq u e o f F u n ctio n a list R e a s o n , trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 92-111, and T h eorie d e s kom m u n ikativen H a n d e ln s, vol. 2: Z u r K ritik derfu n ktion alistisch en Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), pp. 141-69. For a more detailed examination of the historical and philosophical connections between hermeneutics and the classical Greek tradition, see George E. McCarthy, R o m a n c in g A n tiq u ity: G erm a n C ritiq u e o f th e E n lig h ten m en t fr o m W eber to H a b e r m a s (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997), chapter 6, pp.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

209-240. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth a n d M e th o d , trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 317, and W ahrheit un d M eth ode: G ru n d zü g e e in e r p h ilo so p h isc h e n H erm en eu tik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1960), p. 300. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in In terp retive S o c ia l S cien ce: A R e a d e r , ed. Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan, trans. Jeff Close (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 108. Gadamer, Truth a n d M e th o d , p. 299, and W ah rh eit u n d M e th o d e , p. 283. Ibid., p. 296, and W ahrheit u n d M e th o d e , p. 280. Ibid., p. 398, and W ahrheit u n d M e th o d e , pp. 374-375. Ibid., p. 267, and W ahrheit u n d M e th o d e , pp. 251-52. For an overview of the Gadamer/Habermas debates, see McCarthy, R o m a n cin g A n tiq u ity , pp. 359-61. See also the essays in G a d a m e r a n d H erm en eu tics , ed. Hugh Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1991), especially Graeme Nicholson, “Answers to Critical Theory,” pp. 151 -62, and Dieter Misgeld, “Modernity and Hermeneutics: A Critical-Theoretical Rejoinder,” pp. 163-77. Habermas, O n th e L o g ic o f th e S o c ia l S c ie n c e s , p. 168, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o z ia lw iss e n sc h a fte n , p. 283. See also Holub, Jü rgen H a b e r m a s , pp. 67-77. Habermas, O n th e L o g ic o f th e S o c ia l S c ie n c e s , p. 174, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o z ia lw iss e n sc h a fte n , p. 289. See also David Hoy, The C r itic a l C ircle: L itera tu re, H istory, a n d P h ilo so p h ica l H erm en eu tics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 123. Russell Keat, The P o litic s o f S o c ia l T h eory: H a b erm a s, Freud, a n d the C ritiq u e o f P o sitiv ism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 3-4. Jürgen Habermas, “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality,” in C o n te m p o ra ry H erm e n e u tics: H erm e n e u tics a s M eth od, P h ilo so p h y, a n d C ritic ism , trans. Josef B leicher (London: R outledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 191, and “Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik,” in H erm en eu tik u n d D ia lek tik , vol. 1, ed. Rüdiger Bubner, Konrad Cramer, and Reiner Wiehl (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Verlag [Paul Siebeck], 1970), pp. 83-84. Habermas, On the L o g ic o f the S o c ia l S c ie n c e s, pp. 3 5 ,5 4 ,8 7 , and 186-87, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o zia lw iss e n sc h a fte n , pp. 116, 139, 182, 304-05. See also Wellmer, C r itic a l T h e o ry o f S o c iety , pp. 33-34, and K ritis c h e G e se lls c h a fts th e o r ie u n d P o sitivism u s, pp. 33-34. Wellmer argues convincingly that hermeneutics “destroys the illusive appearance of objectivity” (p. 33, and K ritis c h e G e se llsch a ftsth eo rie u n d P o sitiv ism u s, p. 33). These methodological issues are already prefigured in Karl Marx’s analysis of fetishism of commodities in C a p ita l, pp. 71-83 and Theodor Adorno’s analysis of objectivity and reification in N e g a tiv e D ia le c tic s, trans. E. B.

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Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 189-192. Also see Habermas, T h eory a n d P r a c tic e , p. 12, and T h eorie u n d P r a x is , p. 19.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

For an interesting introduction to the use of Freud in the work of other members of the Frankfurt School, especially Adorno and Marcuse, see Joel Whitebook, “Rea­ son and Happiness: Some Psychoanalytic Themes in Critical Theory,” in H a b erm a s a n d M o d e rn ity , ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 140-60. Habermas’s analysis of Freud borrows extensively from the works of Alfred Lorenzer, K r itik d e s p s y c h o a n a ly tis c h e n S y m b o lb e g riffs (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970) and S p ra ch zerstö ru n g u n d -R ekon stru ktion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970); lectures held at the Sigmund Freud Institut in Frankfurt under the direction o f Alexander Mitscherlich; and Alasdair MacIntyre, The U n co n sc io u s: A C o n c e p tu a l A n a ly sis (New York: Humanities Press, 1958). See Jürgen Habermas, A u to n o m y a n d S o lid a rity: In terview s w ith Jürgen H a b e r m a s, ed. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1992), p. 148. Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H u m an In te re sts , p. 214, and E rken n tn is u n d In te re sse , p. 263. Ibid., pp. 216-17, and E rk en n tn is u n d In te re ss e , p. 266. Ibid., pp. 223-24, and E rk en n tn is u n d In te re ss e , p. 274. Jürgen Habermas, “On Systematically Distorted Communication,” Inquiry 13(1970): 209, and McCarthy, The C r itic a l T h eo ry o f Jü rgen H a b e r m a s , p. 195. Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H um an In terests, p. 225, and E rken n tn is u n d In teresse, p. 275. Ibid., p. 260, and E rken n tn is u n d In te re sse, p. 317. Ibid., p. 272, and E rk en n tn is u n d In te re sse, p. 331. Ibid., p. 259, and E rk en n tn is u n d In te re sse, p. 316. Raymond Geuss, The Id e a o f a C r itic a l T h eory: H a b e r m a s a n d th e F ran kfu rt S c h o o l (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), examines this confusion in Western epistemology over the difference between agreement and observation. In traditional epistemology, truth was based on the general agreement about empirical observations. Empiricists mistook this intersubjective and public agreement for the metaphysical imposition of objective reality on the senses. “But the reason they [observation statements] play such a central role in our empirical knowledge is not that they ‘stand closest to sensation,’ but that consensus about them is most wide­ spread and unproblematic” (p. 89). Habermas, K n o w le d g e a n d H um an In terests, p. 266, and E rken n tn is u n d In teresse, p. 325. Habermas, O n th e L o g ic o f th e S o c ia l S c ie n c e s , p. 182, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o z ia lw iss e n sc h a fte n , p. 299. Ibid., p. 87, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o z ia lw iss e n sc h a fte n , p.181. Ibid., p. 87, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o zia lw issen sc h a ften , p.182. Ibid., p. 88, and Z u r L o g ik d e r S o zia lw issen sc h a ften , p.183. Johannes Weiss is well aware that both Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann devel­ oped their theories of structures and systems out of Weber’s theory of social action. What had changed was the perception of how individual action took place in an advanced industrial society. See Weiss, W eber a n d th e M a r x is t W orld (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). According to Weiss, “Processes of generalization, structuring and stabilization of social relations should be directly related to the ‘meaningfulness’ of social action and explained only in terms of their meaningful­ ness as s o c ia l processes” (p. 83). A valuable overview of Habermas’s The T h eo ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n can be found in David Ingram, H a b e r m a s a n d th e D ia le c tic o f R e a so n (New Haven, CT:

334

87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99.

100. 101. 102.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Yale University Press, 1987). Ingram follows closely Habermas’s criticism that Parsons recognized the uncoupling of social structures, the conflict between the lifeworld and social system, democracy and bureaucracy but did not see this as part of the social pathology of modernity. Parsons also noticed the expansion of instru­ mental rationality into communicative action, the lifeworld, and forms of conscious­ ness, but was unable to deal with it adequately because of his integration of systems theory with action theory (p. 147). Only with Habermas’s theory of communicative action is the cultural impoverishment of everyday life seen as an extension of Weber’s theory of rationalization. Benhabib, C ritiq u e , N orm , a n d U to p ia , pp. 230-78. Habermas, The T h eo ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 2, p. 229, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ik a tiven H a n d e ln s , vol. 2, p. 344; and Talcott Parsons, T ow ard a G e n e ra l T h eo ry o f A c tio n , pp. 173-78. For an interesting analysis of the different stages in the development of Parsons’s structural/functionalist theory of society, see Ingram, H a b e rm a s a n d the D ia le c tic o f R e a so n , pp. 135-47. Ingram, H a b e r m a s a n d th e D ia le c tic o f R e a so n , p. 137. Habermas, The T h eo ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 2, p. 308, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ik a tiven H a n d e ln s, vol. 2, p. 455. For more details on a functionalist analysis of politics, see Michael Greven, S ystem th eo rie u n d G esellsch a ftsa n a lyse (Darmstadt: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1974), pp. 222-27. Habermas, The T h eo ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 2, p. 322, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ik a tiven H a n d eln s, vol. 2, p. 476. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 233, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ikativen H a n d e ln s, vol. 2, p. 349. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 307, and T h eo rie d e s kom m u n ikativen H a n d e ln s, vol. 2, p. 454. Thomas McCarthy, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Habermas, The T h eo ry o f C o m ­ m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 1, p. xxxiii. Habermas, The T h eo ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 1, p. 50, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ik a tiven H a n d e ln s, vol. 1, p. 82. Ingram, H a b e rm a s a n d the D ia le c tic o f R e a so n , examines Habermas’s distinction between mythopoeic and modem thought borrowing from the anthropologies of Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, and Godelier, as well as the dangers of ethnocentrism voiced by Stephen Lukes and Peter Winch (pp. 23-26). Habermas, The T h eo ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 1, p. 51, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ik a tiven H a n d e ln s, vol. 1, p. 83. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 67-74, and T h eorie d e s kom m u n ikativen H a n d e ln s , vol. 1, pp. 10413. Habermas also makes the connection here between decentration and rationaliza­ tion and Popper’s theory of the three worlds (objective, social, and subjective world). To these three universes or realms of being, there are three corresponding forms of validity claims: the truth of a scientific statement, the rightness of social norms and regulations, and the truthfulness or sincerity of subjective experiences. Habermas joins these ideas together in his theory of rationality and communicative action. In every interpersonal action involving language, the normative presuppositions o f understanding and the speech act assume that individuals are making propositional statements about the world which are true, acting in a legitimate context of intersubjectively shared values and normative rightness, and expressing truthful and authentic subjective intentions (p. 99, and Theorie d es kom m unikativen H andeln s, vol. 1, p. 149). Habermas, The T h eo ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 1, p. 176, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ik a tiven H a n d eln s, vol. 1, p. 250. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 249, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ikativen H a n d e ln s, vol. 1, p. 339. White, The R e ce n t Work o f Jürgen H a b e rm a s, pp. 116-23.

Reintegrating Science and Ethics 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109.

335

Rick Roderick, H a b e r m a s a n d the F o u n dation s o f C r itic a l T h e o ry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 133. Habermas, The T h e o ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n , vol. 2, p. 356, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ik a tiven H a n d e ln s , vol. 2, p. 523. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 229, and T h eo rie d e s k o m m u n ikativen H a n d e ln s , vol. 2, p. 344. Robert Holsworth and J. Harry Wray, A m eric a n P o litic s a n d E v e r y d a y L ife (New York: Macmillan, 1987). Habermas, The T h e o ry o f C o m m u n ica tive A c tio n ., vol. 2, pp. 283 and 285, and T h eo rie d e s ko m m u n ik a tiven H a n d e ln s , vol. 2, pp. 420 and 422. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 351, and T h eo rie d e s kom m u n ikativen H a n d e ln s , vol. 2, p. 516. See also Claus Offe, C o n tr a d ic tio n s o f th e W elfare S ta te , ed. John Keane (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). For a more detailed discussion of the relation between the late capitalist economy and the welfare state stressing issues of economic production and capital accumula­ tion, see James O’Connor, The F isc a l C risis o f th e S ta te (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973) and C o r p o r a tio n s a n d the S ta te: E ss a y s in th e T h e o ry o f C a p ita lism a n d Im p eria lism (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1974); Richard Edwards, C o n te ste d T errain: The T ran sform ation o f th e W o rkplace in th e T w en tieth C en tu ry

(New York: Basic Books, 1979); Walter Adam and James Brock, The B ig n e ss C om plex: In d u stry, Labor, a n d G o vern m en t in the A m eric a n E c o n o m y (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986) and D a n g ero u s P u rsu its: M e rg e rs a n d A c q u isitio n s in th e A g e o f W all S tre e t (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The D e in d u stria liza tio n o f A m erica : P la n t C losin gs, C om m u n ity A b a n ­ d on m en t, a n d th e D ism a n tlin g o f B a sic In d u stry (New York: Basic Books, 1982) and The G r e a t U-Turn: C o r p o r a te R e stru c tu rin g a n d th e P o la r iz in g o f A m e r ic a (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Center for Popular Economics, E c o n o m ic R e p o rt o f the P eo p le: A n A lte r n a tiv e to th e E c o n o m ic R e p o r t o f th e P re sid e n t (Boston: South End Press, 1986); Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf, A fte r the W astelan d: A D e m o c r a tic E co n o m ics f o r th e Year 2 0 0 0 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Donald Barlett and James Steele, A m eric a : W h at W ent W ron g? (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992); David Gordon, F at a n d M ean : The C o rp o ra te Sq u eeze o f W orking A m erican s a n d the M yth o f M a n a g eria l ‘D o w n sizin g ? (New York: The Free Press, 1996); and Bennett Harrison, L ea n a n d M ea n : The C h a n g in g L a n d sc a p e o f C o r p o r a te P o w e r in th e A g e o f F le x ib ility (New York: Basic Books, 1994). On issues of legitimation and social-welfare and social-insurance programs, see Habermas, L e g itim a tio n C risis; Edward Greenberg, S e rv in g th e Few: C o r p o r a te C a p ita lism a n d th e B ia s o f G o v ern m e n t P o lic y (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974); Thomas McCarthy, “Legitimation Problems in Advanced Capitalism,” in The C r itic a l T h eo ry o f Jü rgen H a b e r m a s , pp. 358-86; George Gilder, W ealth a n d P o ve rty (New York: Basic Books, 1981); David Held, “Crisis Tendencies, Legiti­ mation and the State,” in H a b erm a s: C ritic a l D e b a te s , ed. John Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 181-95; Frances Piven and Richard Cloward, The N e w C la ss War: R e a g a n 's A tta c k on the W elfare S ta te a n d Its C o n seq u en ce s (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), R e g u la tin g th e P oor: The F u n ctio n s o f P u b lic W elfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), and The B rea k in g o f the A m eric a n S o c ia l C o m p a c t (New York: New Press, 1997); Charles Murray, L o sin g G rou n d: A m eric a n S o c ia l P o lic y 1 9 5 0 -1 9 8 0 (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Frank Ackerman, H a za rd o u s to O u r W ealth: E co n o m ic P o licies in the 1 9 8 0 s (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Sheldon Danziger and Daniel Weinberg, F ightin g P o verty: W h at W orks a n d W h at D o e s n 't (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Benhabib, C ritiq u e, N orm , a n d U to p ia , pp. 102-43 and 224-78;

336

110.

111.

112.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason Ingram, H a b e r m a s a n d the D ia le c tic o f R ea so n , pp. 153-62; David Ellwood, P o o r S u p p o rt: P o verty in the A m erican Fam ily (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Theodore Marmor, Jerry Mashaw, and Philip Harvey, A m e r ic a 's M isu n d e rs to o d W elfare S ta te: P ersisten t M yths, E n du rin g R e a litie s (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Kevin Phillips, P o litic s o f R ich a n d P oor: W ealth a n d the A m e r ic a n E le c to ra te in the R e a g a n A fterm a th (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); and Joel Handler, The P o ve rty o f W elfare R eform (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Erich Fromm, The San e S o ciety (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1967); Michael Schneider, N e u ro sis a n d C iv iliz a tio n : A M arx ist/F reu d ia n S y n th e sis , trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Continuum, 1975); and Christopher Lasch, H a ve n in a H e a r tle ss W orld: T he F am ily B e sie g e d (New York: Basic Books, 1977) and The C u ltu re o f N a rcissism (New York: Warner Books, 1979). Albrecht Wellmer, “Reason, Utopia, and the D ia le c tic o f E n lig h te n m e n t ,” in H a b e r m a s a n d M o d e r n ity , ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 36. Marx saw the universalization of market exchange and structural differentiation into law, morality, politics, and the economy as part of the reification of society, class domination, and its resulting forms of false consciousness and ideology. Habermas, Wellmer, and Ingram have criticized Marx for his failure to distinguish between alienation and exploitation, on the one hand, and functional and structural differentiation of social subsystems on the other. Wellmer writes: “Marx had criticized Hegel for justifying the functional differentiation in the modem state, politics, administration, jurisdiction or culture, as well as the ‘loss of ethical life’ in civil society....Marx lumped together these two different types of phenomena, he could believe that the abolition of capitalist property was sufficient to clear the road not only for an abolition of dehumanizing features of modem industrial societies, but also for an abolition of all the functional differentials and the system complexi­ ties which had come with it” (p. 39 and also pp. 51-52). Habermas sees this rational­ ization and differentiation of the economy/bureaucratic administration, morality/ polity, and self-expression/art into different spheres of knowledge and action (in­ strumental, practical, and aesthetic) as part of the potential enlightenment and eman­ cipation of Western society. Each area makes truth claims that are cognitively and communicatively redeemable. For Marx, critique was based on immanent principles and the logic of capital. With Habermas, the utopian dimension of social critique has shifted from the logic of capital, technological potential, and political ideals to the possibilities inherent in all forms of democratic participation and communication. On this issue, see also Ingram, H a b erm a s a n d th e D ia le c tic o f R e a so n , p. 152, and Nancy Love, “What’s Left of Marx?” in The C a m b rid g e C o m p a n io n to H a b erm a s, ed. Steven White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 52. For an examination of the relationship between Habermas and Rorty, see Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism,” C ritic a l In q u iry 16 (Winter 1990): 355-70; Rorty’s response in the essay ‘Truth and Freedom: A Response to Thomas McCarthy,” C r itic a l In q u iry 16 (Winter 1990): 633-43; and McCarthy’s critique once again in “Ironist Theory as a Vocation: A Response to Rorty’s Reply,” C ritic a l T h eo ry 16 (Spring 1990): 633-55, “An Ex­ change on Truth, Freedom, and Politics,” C r itic a l In q u iry 16 (Spring 1990), “Phi­ losophy and Social Practice: Richard Rorty’s ‘New Pragmatism’” and “Postscript: Ironist Theory as a Vocation,” in Id e a ls a n d Illu sio n s: O n R e co n stru c tio n a n d D e c o n stru c tio n in C o n te m p o r a ry C ritic a l T h eo ry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 11-42, and “On the Idea of a Critical Theory and Its Relation to Philoso­ phy” and “Reason in a Postmetaphysical Age,” in P h ilo s o p h y a n d C ritic a l T heory: A R e p rise , Thomas McCarthy and David Hoy, eds. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994). See also the essays from the S y m p o siu m on C r itic a l T h eo ry by Thomas

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McCarthy and David Hoy, especially Richard Rorty, “The Ambiguity of Reason,” and Thomas McCarthy, “Philosophy and Critical Theory: A Reply to Richard Rorty and Seyla Benhabib,” C o n stellation s 3, no. 1 (1996): 95-103; and Richard Bernstein, “One-Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philoso­ phy,” (1987) in Richard Bernstein, The N e w C o n s te lla tio n : The E th ic a l-P o litic a l H o rizo n s o f M o d e m ity /P o s tm o d e m ity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 230-57; Rorty’s reply in “Thugs and Theorists,” P o litic a l T h eo ry 15 (November 1987), pp. 564-80; and Bernstein’s rejoinder, “Rorty’s Liberal Utopia” (1990), in The N ew C o n stella tio n , pp. 258-92. Also see Richard Rorty, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernism,” and Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counter Questions,” in H a b e r m a s a n d M o d e r n ity , ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 161-75, and “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn” (1996), in O n th e P r a g ­ m a tic s o f C o m m u n ica tio n (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 343-82. For other commentaries on this issue, see Dieter Misgeld, “Modernity and Social Science: Habermas and Rorty,” P h ilo s o p h y a n d S o c ia l C ritic ism 11, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 355-72; Tony Couture, “Habermas, Rorty and the Purpose of Philoso­ phy,” E id o s 6 (June 1987): 53-69; Kai Nielsen, “Skeptical Remarks on the Scope of Philosophy,” S o c ia l T h eo ry a n d P ra c tic e 19, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 117-60, and A fte r the D e m ise o f the T radition: R orty ; C ritic a l T heory ; a n d the F ate o f P h ilo so p h y (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 195-216; David Hall, R ich a rd R o rty : P ro p h e t a n d P o e t o f the N e w P ra g m a tism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 146-54; Hauke Brunkhorst, “Rorty, Putnam and the Frankfurt School,” P h ilo s o p h y a n d S o c ia l C ritic ism 22, no. 5 (Summer 1996): 1-16; and Jozef Niznik and John Sanders, eds., D e b a tin g the S ta te o f P h ilo so p h y: H a b erm a s , R orty, a n d K o la k o w sk i (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 1-29 and 97-103. 113. Jürgen Habermas, “On Systematically Distorted Communication,” Inquiry 13 (1970): 205-18, “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” In q u iry 13 (1970): 363-72, “Wahrheitstheorien,” in W irklichkeit u n d R eflexion : W alter S ch u lz zu m 60. G e b u r ts ta g , ed. Helmut Fahrenbach (Pfullingen: Günther Neske Verlag, 1973), pp. 211-65, and “What is Universal Pragmatics?” in C om m u n ication a n d the E volu tion o f S o c ie ty , trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 1-68, and “Was heisst Universalpragmatik?” in S p ra ch p ra g m a tik u n d P h ilo so p h ie, ed. KarlOtto Apel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976), pp. 174-272. For a discus­ sion of Habermas’s changing position on these normative ideas within the ideal speech situation, see Roderick, H a b erm a s a n d the F ou n dation s o f C ritic a l T h eory, pp. 79, 83, 86,111-12, and 158-64. Roderick writes that the ideal speech situation “has, in part, the status of a normative ideal” (p. 86), but argues later in his book that Habermas’s position changes in that the ideal speech situation no longer represents an image of the good life. However, it does retain its normative dimension which “consists in its usefulness as an interpretive guide for locating social pathologies in modernity, and in suggesting remedies for these pathologies” (p. 112). He also traces the development of Habermas’s critical theory of communication from its early stages as communicative competence and the ideal speech situation (1970) to the theory o f discourse and truth as consensus (1973) and universal pragmatics and social evolution (1976) (pp. 74-105). 114. Roderick, H a b e r m a s a n d th e F o u n dation s o f C r itic a l T h eo ry, p. 12. 115. For an analysis of Habermas’s appropriation and reconstruction of Marx’s theory of historical materialism, see Tom Rockmore, H a b e r m a s on H is to r ic a l M a te ria lism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). There has been much criticism of Habermas’s view of discursive ethics and democratic consensus. See Thomas McCarthy, Id e a ls a n d Illu sion s, pp. 182 and 198, and Bernstein, The N e w C o n stel­ la tio n , pp. 220-21.

338 116.

117.

118.

119.

120.

121. 122.

123. 124.

Objectivity and the Silence of Reason One difficulty that has plagued the critical theorists from the beginning has been that of defining the utopian and emancipatory dimension of social thought. As Geuss, The Id ea o f a C ritic a l T h eory, has asked: Where do the standards for social criticism of the shallowness of a narcissistic and utilitarian world come from? Geuss con­ tends that for Habermas it comes from the lifeworld; it comes “from ‘the cultural tradition’ standards of what the ‘good life’ is” — that is, from the aesthetic, religious, and metaphysical values of society” (p. 82). Others find the normative foundations of social critique in the transcendental structures of language and communicative interaction. Habermas, “What is Universal Pragmatics?” in C om m u n ication a n d the E vo lu tio n o f S o c ie ty , p. 3, and “Was heisst Universalpragmatik?” in S p ra ch p ra g m a tik u n d P h ilo s o p h ie , p. 176. For an elaboration and expansion of these ideas, see Habermas’s more recent works, including E rlä u teru n g en zu r D isk u rseth ik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), and J u stifica tio n a n d A p p lic a tio n : R em a rk s on D isc o u r se E th ics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); and F a k tizitä t u n d G eltu n g : B eiträ g e zu r D isku rsth eorie d es R ech ts un d d e s d em okratisch en R ech tsstaats (Frank­ furt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), and B etw een F acts a n d N o rm s: C o n tr ib u ­ tio n s to a D isc o u r se T h eory o f L a w a n d D e m o c r a c y , trans. William Rehg (Cam­ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). See also G. McCarthy, R o m a n c in g A n tiq u ity, pp. 243-83. White, The R e ce n t Work o f Jürgen H a b erm a s, pp. 48-50, and Benhabib, C ritiq u e , N orm , a n d U to p ia , p. 334. Roderick, H a b e r m a s a n d th e F o u n dation s o f C r itic a l T heory, writes: “The ‘ideal speech situation’ (as a communicative characterization of the ideals of freedom, truth, and justice) contains a ‘practical hypothesis’ (namely, that such a situation o u gh t to be brought about) upon which the critique of ideology (as ‘systematically distorted communication’) can be based” (p. 158). Thomas McCarthy, “Rationality and Relativism: Habermas’s ‘Overcoming’ of Hermeneutics,” in H a b erm a s: C r itic a l D e b a te s , ed. John Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 57-78. John Thompson, “Universal Pragmatics,” in H a b erm a s: C r itic a l D e b a te s , p. 132. Joel Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” T elos, no. 40 (Summer 1979): 41-69; McCarthy, The C r itic a l T h eo ry o f Jürgen H a b erm a s, pp. 110-25; Henning Ottmann, “Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection,” in H a b erm a s: C r iti­ c a l D e b a te s , pp. 79-97; C. Fred Alford, “Jürgen Habermas and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: What is Theoretically Fruitful Knowledge?” S o c ia l R e se a rc h 52, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 119-49, and S cien ce a n d the R even g e o f N atu re: M a rcu se a n d H a b e r m a s (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1985), pp. 139-77. Radnitzky, C o n te m p o r a ry S c h o o ls o f M e ta sc ie n c e , vol. 2, pp. 160-85. Roderick, H a b e r m a s a n d the F o u n dation s o f C r itic a l T h eory, pp. 160-64.

Index Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2, 5, 189, 197, 268, 279, 287, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 313, 330 Goddard, David, 174, 175 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 8 6 ,1 4 4 ,1 6 9 Gottl, Friedrich, 166, 168

Adorno, Theodor, 2, 15, 16, 17, 206, 215, 216, 225, 226, 227, 228, 23037, 241, 243, 260, 262, 332, 333 Albert, Hans, 1, 15, 17, 215, 216, 236, 249-57, 263, 264, 265 Apel, Karl-Otto, 5, 264, 287 Apollo, 10, 11,70, 100, 101, 104, 114, 1 1 5 ,1 1 6 ,1 2 3 ,1 4 4 ,1 4 5 Aristotle, 72, 8 8 ,9 3 ,2 3 2 ,2 8 7 ,2 9 3 ,2 9 4 , 297

Descartes, René, 28, 30, 72, 88, 117, 122, 228, 276, 294 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 5, 7, 13, 40, 52, 55, 58, 169, 170, 178, 187, 191, 192, 194, 196, 1 9 9 ,2 0 5 ,2 0 8 ,3 0 0 , 301 Dionysus, 1 0 ,1 1 ,6 0 ,7 0 ,1 0 0 ,1 0 1 ,1 1 3 , 114, 115, 116, 123, 144, 145, 146, 152,155 Duhem, Pierre, 217, 259

Habermas, Jürgen, 1,2, 3 ,5 ,1 4 , 15,17, 1 8 ,1 9 ,2 0 ,2 1 ,2 2 ,6 4 ,1 2 7 ,1 7 9 ,1 8 9 , 206, 210, 215, 216, 226, 227, 23658, 259, 264, 267-338 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 7, 4 8 ,5 2 ,5 9 ,6 4 ,6 7 ,7 0 ,1 0 9 , 111,112, 226, 237, 239, 256, 268, 271, 27275, 276, 278, 286, 287, 298, 307, 322, 323, 327, 329, 336 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 119, 265, 287, 294, 296 Hennis, Wilhelm, 127, 146, 183, 194, 195, 198, 2 0 3 ,2 0 4 ,2 1 1 Henrich, Dieter, 63, 204, 206 Hobbes, Thomas, 88, 106 Holub, Robert, 235, 238 Horkheimer, Max, 2 ,1 6 , 228, 229, 230, 234, 245, 248, 257, 260, 261, 270, 312 Hume, David, 5, 7, 28-30, 32, 33, 37, 57, 58, 61, 72, 89, 90, 91, 92, 100, 105, 117, 132, 200, 217, 218, 235, 238,241 Husserl, Edmund, 228, 268, 278

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 7, 256 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 7, 119, 122 Fischer, Kuno, 69, 95-98, 9 9 ,1 0 0 , 101, 104,117, 121 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 19, 120, 125, 154, 190, 195, 206, 209, 239, 240, 268, 270,271,279-81,289,298,299-308, 333

Kalberg, Stephen, 180, 181 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 22, 27, 28-39, 4 1 ,4 2 ,4 4 ,4 8 , 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 70-117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 132, 135, 138, 143, 144, 155, 161, 164, 165, 169, 172, 174, 185, 188, 189, 193, 199, 205, 219,

Berkeley, George, 7 4 ,7 9 ,8 0 , 81,90 ,1 1 9 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen, 11, 155, 195, 201 Brunn, Hans Henrik, 148,191,200,204, 206, 207

Cahnman, Werner, 179, 180 Cohen, Hermann, 7, 27, 88, 94

339

340

O bjectivity and the Silence of R eason 69, 70, 76, 78, 121, 122, 123, 131, 138, 140, 149, 152, 154, 200, 204, 208, 320

80, 90, 95, 99-117, 124, 127, 128, 129, 141, 144, 145, 146, 155, 181, 187, 198, 210, 256, 279, 314,

226, 235, 238, 239, 250, 256, 264, 268, 272, 273, 275, 286, 292, 323, 327 Knies, Karl, 4, 61, 127, 129, 131, 154, 1 5 6 ,1 5 7 ,1 6 3 -7 4 ,1 8 7 ,1 9 4 ,2 0 0 ,2 0 3 Kortian, Garbis, 261, 278, 329 Kries, Johannes, 142, 180, 195, 196 Kroner, Richard, 27 Kuhn, Thomas, 17, 144, 206, 217, 265, 271 ,3 2 2

Oakes, Guy, 6 4 ,1 9 1 ,1 9 3 ,1 9 4 ,1 9 9 ,2 0 8 , 212

Lange, Friedrich Albert, 7, 8, 9, 12, 69, 87-95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 131 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 7 2 ,9 0 ,1 0 0 , 228 Locke, John, 74, 75, 76, 79, 88, 118, 122,232 Lorenzer, Alfred, 333 Luckmann, Thomas, 313 Luhmann, Niklas, 1, 179, 284, 333 Lukäcs, Georg, 209, 210

Parsons, Talcott, 1, 5, 18, 19, 127, 174, 179, 190, 211, 284, 289, 3 0 9 -1 1 ,3 1 9 ,3 2 9 ,3 3 3 ,3 3 4 Plato, 8 ,7 2 , 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 88, 104, 109, 120, 122, 151, 204, 293 Poincaré, Jules Henri, 217, 260 Popper, Karl, 1, 15, 16, 194, 206, 216-25, 226, 228, 231, 235, 238, 239, 240, 246-58, 259, 2 6 2 ,2 6 3 , 265, 270, 334 Protagoras, 88, 89

Malthus, Thomas, 12, 157 Marcuse, Herbert, 210, 257, 261, 279, 333 Marx, Karl, 5, 7, 16, 19, 27, 111, 121, 154, 180, 183, 185, 198, 203, 209, 210, 230, 232, 233, 240, 256, 262, 270, 275-79, 280, 281, 286, 289, 298, 299, 307, 309, 312, 321, 329, 330, 332, 336, 337 McCarthy, Thomas, 277, 326, 331 Mead, George Herbert, 240, 270, 279, 280, 292, 309, 330 Menger, Carl, 4, 10, 11, 12, 15, 127, 155, 156, 164, 180, 187, 195, 197, 20 1 ,2 0 2 , 2 0 3 ,2 2 3 ,2 5 9 Meyer, Eduard, 61, 135, 141, 143, 193, 228 ,2 2 9 Mill, John Stuart, 92, 121, 223, 228, 259,283 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 199, 257 Miinsterberg, Hugo, 166, 176

Quine, Willard Van, 1 ,1 7 ,7 1 ,2 0 6 ,2 7 2 , 322

Natorp, Paul, 7, 9, 27 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 22, 44, 45, 48, 60, 61, 66,

146, 307, 103, 220,

215, 237, 260,

Radbruch, Gustav, 195, 196 Radnitzky, Gerard, 290, 291, 331 Ricardo, David, 12, 157 Rickert, Heinrich, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 22, 27, 28, 39, 40-61, 64-67, 117, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 135, 137, 139, 144, 148, 155, 156, 158, 169, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 196, 200, 205, 207, 208, 212, 215, 244, 270 Ringer, Fritz, 146, 180, 191, 197, 206,

212 Roderick, Rick, 323, 326, 337 Rorty, Richard, 1 ,1 7 ,7 1 ,2 0 6 , 272,317, 322, 336-37 Roscher, Wilhelm, 4 ,6 1 ,1 2 7 , 129, 131, 155-163, 164, 165, 172, 177, 179, 180, 186, 187, 199,202, 2 0 3 ,2 0 7 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 204, 2 3 1 ,2 8 3

Scheler, Max, 197, 198, 261, 265

Index Schei sky, Helmut, 271, 328 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 292, 331 Schmoller, Gustav, 4 ,1 0 ,1 1 ,1 2 , 15,61, 127, 131, 137, 155, 156, 164, 187, 195, 197, 199, 2 0 1 ,2 0 2 , 2 0 3 ,2 1 5 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 4 ,5 , 8 ,9 , 10,22, 3 4 ,4 5 ,4 8 ,6 1 ,6 9 ,7 0 -8 7 ,9 3 ,9 5 ,9 7 , 9 8 ,9 9 ,1 0 0 . 1 0 1 ,1 0 2 ,1 0 3 ,1 0 4 ,1 0 8 , 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 131, 144, 145, 1 5 1 ,2 5 6 ,3 1 4 Schroyer, Trent, 175-76, 186, 207 Schumpeter, Joseph, 201, 203 Schutz, Alfred, 268, 278, 330 Sim m el,Georg, 4 ,1 3 ,6 1 ,1 2 8 ,1 6 6 ,1 6 7 , 187 Smith, Adam, 12, 157, 203 Socrates, 89, 102, 109, 115, 220, 288 Sophocles, 107, 114, 169 Spinoza, Benedict, 72, 122 Stammler, Rudolf, 9, 27, 61, 127, 131, 194 Staudinger, Franz, 9, 27

341

Stauth, Georg, 146, 181, 199, 210

Turner, Bryan, 180, 183

Weber, Max, 1 ,2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 27, 28, 39, 44, 45, 48, 54, 60, 61, 64, 67, 6 9 ,7 0 ,1 0 2 ,1 0 6 ,1 0 9 ,1 1 3 ,1 1 7 ,1 2 7 212, 215, 216, 223, 224, 225, 228, 229, 238, 240, 259, 261, 264, 270, 271, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284, 289, 290, 3 0 7 ,3 0 9 , 3 1 1 ,3 1 2 , 313, 314, 316, 3 1 7 ,3 1 9 ,3 2 0 , 3 2 5 ,3 3 3 ,3 3 4 Weiss, Johannes, 209, 210, 333 Wellmer, Albrecht, 259, 332, 336 Winch, Peter, 268, 299, 331 Windelband, Wilhelm, 4 ,7 7 ,2 7 ,4 0 ,4 1 , 48, 6 1 ,6 6 , 128, 132, 187, 208, 215, 244, 248, 270, 289 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 260, 265, 268, 330