The concern to combine social critique and hermeneutical openness, announced in the previous chapter, stems in part from dissatisfaction with a Kommunikationsverweigerung (refusal to communicate) between two schools of continental philosophy. Both the general question of truth and the more specific question of artistic truth have been central points of contention between Heideggerian thinking and Critical Theory. Whereas Martin Heidegger orients his conception of truth toward the unveiling of Being in beings, Jürgen Habermas regards truth as a dimension of validity in “communicative action” that comes to the fore when propositions are asserted and tested. Heidegger insists that the “truth” of assertions and propositions derives from a more original and comprehensive event of truth. Habermas, by contrast, resists expanding the notion of truth beyond one dimension of intersubjective validity, even though he considers the other dimensions analogous to truth. And, while not denying the disclosive functions of ordinary language – its ability to open new perspectives on world, self, and interpersonal relations – he does not make disclosure central to language in the way that Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer do.

These differences become especially evident in their conceptions of art. Habermas seems to be of two minds concerning art. On the one hand, he regards art as an expert culture in which aesthetic validity claims can be thematized.