Greetings Fizzites!
A year ago, we all sat in the conference room at Tufts and discussed Habermas’s ideas of rational deliberation. And my sense at the time was that we came away from that discussion feeling restless: Habermas is great at talking about talking (all that “redemption through deliberation” business), but where in his system is the ACTION? My sense was that we suspected that his ideas, however interesting in an abstract way, would be of limited value in the actual DOING of civic work.
Since then, I’ve felt (mildly) anxious that we didn’t give Habermas his full due. I believe Habermas is more than just a theorist: he is in fact interested in the DOING of civic work and does have important things to say about how his theories of rationalizing deliberation pertain to action itself.
In a 1996 essay, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” Habermas says: “In the network of established practices, implicitly raised validity claims that have been accepted against a broad background of intersubjectively shared convictions constitute the rails along with behavioral certainties run…in moving from action to rational discourse, what is initially naively held-to-be-true is released from the mode of behavioral certainty and assumes the form of a hypothetical proposition whose validity is left open for the duration of the discourse” (p. 363).
Habermas calls this a “circular process” where we deliberately suspend our belief in our naively held-to-be-true behavioral certainties so that we can engage in episodes of legitimizing argumentation, wherein we’re prepared to give reasons for our claims and to be bound by the force of the best reasons. But he says we can’t do this while we’re acting, since action requires naive certainty. He’s saying, I think, that we need periods where we are relieved of the need to act so that we can engage in discourse about what we’re doing. Of course, that discourse, if we want it to authorize our claims (to, say, justice) has to conform to the ideal speech situation. But as I read him, Habermas wants to locate the rationalizing authority for action in those intervening episodes of discourse.
So here are my questions:
Do we agree that for civic action to be just, it must be punctuated with episodes of rational deliberation? If so, what’s the best “mix” of action and deliberation?
If we do need episodes of deliberation to ensure the justice of our action, how and where can we carve out such sites of rational deliberation? Is a discipline of civic studies such a place (with, say, accompanying courses and publications)? Is the mass media?
How decontextualized from specific action sites can such discursive spaces be?
