Habermas on Crisis and Critique
The following is my seminar notes on Habermas’ notion of crisis and critique.
“Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique ” lays out Habermas’ understanding of Marxism “as a philosophy of history that is expressly designed with political intent but is at the same time scientifically falsifiable” (47). To get at what is at stake in this formulation, we need to flesh out critique, crisis, and the philosophy of history.
The concept that Marx employs to describe his project, the “critique” of political economy, is drawn from an intellectual tradition that stretches from the humanists, through the literati, to the theory and practice of 18th-century philosophers. Within this tradition, critique came to mean a sort of individual capacity to discern rightly:
Critique became practically synonymous with reason; it signified good taste and clever judgment. It was the medium for ascertaining what was correct, which laws of nature harmonized with what was just—and it was the energy that drove the activity of reason restlessly forward and around and about until it finally turned against itself. (47)
Critique was, essentially, bound up with what the philosophers of the period thought they were doing: thinking through nature to its rational foundation. Given this intellectual tradition, Habermas believes that it is necessary to explain why Marx felt his project was the “dialectical overcoming of philosophy” (47). To explain Marx’s belief, Habermas offers an argument intended to reveal the necessity of joining critique with crisis.
The genealogy of crisis that Habermas provides in “Between Philosophy and Science,” is rather truncated; he provides a longer one in “What Does a Crisis Mean Today? Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism.” There, Habermas uses the notion of a medical and aesthetic crises and the doctrine of salvation to elaborate what is at stake in the broader notion of crisis as it applies to critique.
For patients who are ill, a medical crisis is something that afflicts them from the outside that “seems to be something objective” (266). Moreover, this external force appears to be hampering his subjective capacities. This suggests the objective force of a crisis: “Crisis suggests the notion of an objective power depriving a subject of part of his normal sovereignty. If we interpret a process as a crisis, we are tacitly giving it a normative meaning. When the crisis is resolved, the trapped subject is liberated” (267). Critique in this instance would be the capacity to discern the objective condition that is wreaking havoc on the patient’s capacities, and to properly heal it . But for Habermas, a crisis is never simply external, never merely a virulent bacterial infection, say, of E. coli. He underscores this by making use of the classical aesthetic notion of crisis:
crisis signifies the turning point of a fateful process which, although fully objective, does not simply break in from the outside. There is a contradiction expressed in the catastrophic culmination of a conflict of action, and that contradiction is inherent in the very structure of the system of action and in the personality systems of the characters. Fate is revealed in conflicting norms that destroy the identities of the characters unless they in turn manage to regain their freedom by smashing the mythical power of fate. (267)
If crisis were simply something external, there would be no sense to it—at least, not as a tragic artwork. At any rate, apt critique in this sphere must identify how the crisis to which the actors are subject is a function of their personalities or belief systems. For a drama to be a classical tragedy, it can’t merely tell of an external force that destroys a subject. A tragic crisis would be one where the patient afflicted by E. coli is not just a luckless person who eats a bad burger, but a legislator who has authored a bill relaxing sanitation standards in meat-processing plants and still eats beef. The notion that the internal forces that motivate what is subject to crisis generate the crisis itself is necessary to critique, as will become clear.
Finally, to the characteristic of crisis as an opposing force that is somehow inherent in the internal make-up of whatever is subject to it, Habermas adds one final component: the suppression of the doctrine of salvation. The doctrine of salvation, the idea that history was the inevitable progression toward some sort of redemption, underwrote a notion of critique that was more or less wholly subjective: no matter what one discerned in the objective conditions of things, history would progress apace; whether or not a person recognized as much was only a measure of his or her taste. As Habermas renders it in the essay on Marxism, for this perspective “there seemed to be no need for a critical decision regarding uncertain or ambiguous consequences”; for it, history is understood “not as the critical process of separating ambivalent forces but as linear progress” (48). In order to develop a critical understanding of crises, one cannot understand objective conditions as pregiven and tending necessarily toward an established end; the outcome must be uncertain and changeable through practice. Habermas argues that it was the Lisbon earthquake that initially shook critique from its complacent faith in salvation, but, since Nature brooks no criticism, it wasn’t until the economic crises of the 19th century that critique understood that it itself was caught up in crises. Critique in this sense is acutely aware of being interlaced with the forces underlying a crisis that it seeks to resolve; its success is not brought about through subjective discernment but by intervening “in the crisis with the means of the crisis, that is, practically” (49). The success of this intervention is what determines whether or not critique is “true.” We can now look to the problem of Marx’s rejection of “philosophy.”
According to Habermas, Hegel appropriated a myth of the self-abasement of a god in order to develop a “metaphysical calculus with which to compute the whole of world history as a crisis complex” (49). Where the original myth had sought to understand the progress of world history as the work of man alone and orphaned-from-divinity, in Hegel’s interpretation the myth becomes the means to see in crisis the “God in the absolute spirit, liberated by humanity to become himself, [who] knows that he already knew everything beforehand and retained his mastery over history even while in history” (50). In this scenario, the practical capacity of humanity remains circumscribed; the end to which history progresses remains pregiven. It is a version of salvation thinking. This is what Marx is critiquing when he claims that Hegel’s philosophy does not engage the world but scrutinizes the conceptual model it has fashioned of it. The model shows that the crisis is resolved, when all the while the unresolved contradictions of the crisis continue to rend the fabric of the world.
But in order to maintain this position, Habermas contends, Marx must assume the dialectic. That is, in order to believe critique capable of resolving the crisis in actuality—which Marx holds would require a determinate negation of existing conditions—Marx has to presume that a dialectical logic underlies the movement of society. Obviously this is not an innocent assumption and has to be established. Habermas suggests that Marx attempts to do so by analyzing “social labor,” and the “domination of living labor by dead labor that can be decoded materialistically as the ‘rational core’ of the idealist dialectic” (51). This core, Marx held, is that people fashion themselves through their activity, and what is important in Hegel is that he “grasps the essence of labor and comprehends objective man—true, because real man—as the outcome of man’s own labor” (51). People are, however, unaware that they are the authors of their own history.
Habermas stresses that the shift from an idealist dialectic to one that is situated within social labor deprives Marx’s account of a few certainties on which Hegel could rely. Thinkers following Marx, unlike the practitioners of critical criticism, cannot keep
the guarantee that at every stage humanity, in experiencing what befalls it, will also experience itself rationally, and will in fact overcome alienation. It remains uncertain whether critical insight into the dialectic of alienated labor not only emerges precisely from the objective context of crisis but also develops to the point of practical efficacy. (51)
So: there are fewer guarantees, and no guarantee of salvation. So it goes.
We have now a more or less full account of critique’s relationship to crisis. The sense that crises are a product of human activity means that critique, if it is to have more than merely subjective weight, could no longer contemplatively discern the natural course of things, but had to analyze the ambivalent forces inherent in human activity. That these forces, due to their ambivalent, contradictory nature create crises which, to put it mildly, cause problems for human subjects also indicates that critique can play a role somewhat like a physician in treating the ills of society. And finally, while there is no guarantee that the effort of critique will realign peoples’ activities so that they work toward their subjective liberation or emancipation, the work of mending the rent world is now allotted to the subjects living in it and humankind, as it were, is in charge of its own redemption. But, this, which is nice conceptually, is not all that Habermas sees in Marx’s understanding of critique: it is also scientific, that is, “scientifically falsifiable.” This should mean that it demonstrates how the objective conditions of peoples’ lives are their product in such a way that it can be disproven.
To establish his theory as science, Marx turns to political economy. In this sense his “critique” is at once an investigation into the current state of thought and an effort to show that political economy’s categories inadequately grasp their object. In doing so, he’s hoping to reveal to laboring subjects the fact that the economic crises to which they are subject are the product of their own hands and need not occur. The criterion for the resolution of these crises would be the sphere of economic circulation: when the ambiguous forces of capitalism are set right, the forces of production are no longer capital, no longer directed by questions of profitability. Corn, for instance, would no longer rot in silos when its sale was not profitable.
Some remarks:
- Much is made in this essay of the idea of a global crisis—a crisis in the very fabric of the world. This leads Habermas to suggest at the end that Marx maintained that the root of all crises was economic. Whether or not that is the case, I wonder if looking for forces that are broad enough to bring about global crises allows for a critique to be “true,” or practically realized; could it be better to focus on specific moments of “ambivalent forces” and try to resolve them, in their local environment and according to their specific (or concrete, if that works) causes? For instance, producers’ direct control of their economic products may not qualify as salvation or redemption, it may not cause the dead to rise and angels to sing, and after it occurred the world may still be partially divided along jagged edges, but it would, if “true,”—that is, assuming Marx’s economic picture is correct—more closely align subjects’ intentions with the objective conditions facing them. Which should make us wonder how useful the notion of crisis in the world, or the world as crisis, is, and what conditions a critique aimed at resolving such a crisis would have to meet.
- Habermas notes that materialism loses the certainty that its critique will succeed. I hear echoes in this of some of the earlier writings on “work” that we looked act. Specifically, I have in mind the piece by Honneth’s essay on “Work and Instrumental Action.” Conceptually, the loss of a inevitable progression seems to weigh on these essays. Am I right in sensing this in these essays, and, if so, is it nostalgia for the doctrine of salvation (which would preclude the possibility of the emancipation hinted at in critique)?
- Habermas argues that for Marx, the resolution of the crisis is a “determinate negation.” Looking at something from his later political writings, like for instance the Critique of the Gotha Program, this is clear: vague pronouncements are dismantled and precise programs suggested, all with respect to a highly developed—some would say totalizing—understanding of the ambivalent forces that bring about the objective situation. The crisis to which Marx responds has defined parameters and causes, and his solution is aimed at them. I wonder whether we can say this of the “crisis of legitimacy” Habermas develops in “What Does a Crisis Mean Today?”
Tags: crisis, Critique, Jürgen Habermas, Karl Marx
