HABERMAS’S “KANTIAN PRAGMATISM”

Habermas's philosophical career can easily and instructively be read as a succession of attempts to appropriate the achievements of Kant's critical philosophy without being drawn into its commitment to a “philosophy of the subject.” Even Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), whose task is described as the continuation of epistemology by other means (e.g. social theory) and which is perhaps the work most philosophically distant from Kant, opens with an appreciation of Kant's enterprise: “The critique of knowledge was still conceived in reference to a system of cognitive faculties that included practical reason and reflective judgment as naturally as critique itself, that is, a theoretical reason that can dialectically ascertain not only its limits but also its own Idea” (KHI 3). Similarly, Habermas's later conception of philosophy as (in part) a “reconstructive science” that seeks to make explicit the pretheoretical know-how of speaking and acting subjects - expressed most clearly in the project of a formal or universal pragmatics - shares many features with other roughly contemporaneous attempts to deploy transcendental (or “quasitranscendental”) arguments without the trappings of transcendental idealism. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the project of discourse ethics, first outlined in the early 1980s, is explicitly conceived as a defense of a Kantian conception of morality (e.g. categorical imperatives that bind us solely in virtue of our capacity for rational agency) within the context of his theory of communicative action.