Critical Theory,Transcendental Phenomenology,and the Status of Reason: Horkheimer and Habermas on Husserl’s Idea of Rigorous Philosophical Science

Abstract

This article critically interrogates Max Horkheimer’s and Jürgen Habermas’s criticisms of Husserl’s idea of phenomenological philosophy as a rigorous science. It argues that both critical theorists basically misconstrue Husserl’s understanding of philosophical method and, consequently, miss an opportunity to engage not only with transcendental phenomenology’s critique of modern mathematical natural science but also with its significance for the renewal of a concept of substantive reason consistent with critical theory. Although Horkheimer posits, without ever properly clarifying, such a concept of reason and Habermas’s project centres on rethinking this concept, the lingering positivist and pragmatist presuppositions of both thinkers hinders serious engagement with Husserl’s thought.

The tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory has always had an ambivalent relationship to the concept of reason. While centring the critique of reason’s instrumentalization by modern positivism and pragmatism, understood as ideological expressions of the techno-scientific-industrial complex of a statified monopoly capitalism, most of its leading thinkers, in contrast to the poststructuralists, always retained what could be called a nostalgia for the kind of encompassing and substantive concept of reason advanced by classical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel. However, as Martin Jay points out in his book Reason after its Eclipse, the precise shape of the substantive alternative to instrumental reason remained rather elusive for the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers, only later taking on more determinate shape – with somewhat truncated ambitions – in Habermas’s theory of communicative action. ¹ The problem of a theory of reason is of particular significance for thinkers, like the early Horkheimer or Habermas, who pursue a more traditional strategy of grounding critical theory primarily in rational discursive thought rather that turning to the insights purported to be gleaned from aesthetic or erotic experience. Therefore, one might expect that Edmund Husserl – the twentieth century philosopher who perhaps made the most sustained and significant attempt to renew a substantive concept of reason in the face of its eclipse – would be at the centre of Horkheimer’s and Habermas’s attention. However, while appreciating aspects of his critique of modern scientific objectivism and positivist epistemology, both critical theorists reject Husserl’s constructive project of a rigorous phenomenological science for remaining within the ambit of “traditional theory” and its search for timeless, ahistorical truths.

Despite Horkheimer’s and Habermas’s negative evaluation of Husserl’s constructive project, I would like to return to the question of whether transcendental phenomenology can offer any resources for the philosophical foundations of critical social theory. In particular, I would like to critically interrogate, and raise some difficulties with, Horkheimer’s and Habermas’s respective critiques of Husserl’s idea of philosophy as a rigorous science. ² To motivate the discussion, the first part of the paper outlines the basic tension between Husserl’s epistemological critique of modern reason, which problematizes reasons’s worldly presuppositions in order to study their transcendental meaning, and the Frankfurt School’s social critique of reason, which criticizes reasons’s flight from worldly politics and history. The second part of the paper examines the critique of Husserl developed by Horkheimer in his 1926 lecture series “Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy” (ICP). I argue that in misrecognizing Husserl’s idea of philosophy as a kind of deductivistic rationalism, Horkheimer fails to understand the meaning of transcendental phenomenology’s apriori research into essences and how, despite some essential differences, it is largely consistent with Horkheimer’s own idea of an open and self-critical dialectical system. The third part turns to Habermas’s 1965 Frankfurt inaugural address, later expanded into and published as an appendix to his book Knowledge and Human Interests (KHI), where Husserl’s critique of modern positivism is attacked for returning to an ancient, pre-modern ideal of traditional theory understood as a purely disinterested ontological speculation on the nature of being. This critique, I argue, fails to understand the modernity of Husserl’s project of a transcendental critique of knowledge, which suspends any claims to ontological or metaphysical knowledge, just as much as any claims to empirical knowledge, in order to clarify the origins of these claims and their validity in concrete functioning subjectivity. I also argue that Habermas’s grounding of his own concept of communicative rationality in an evolutionary pragmatism is open to a Husserlian critique of its implicit relativism. ³ Finally, part four suggests that transcendental phenomenology is best understood as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of the successful development of a critical social theory.

Social Critique Contra Critical Epistemology

Husserl’s idea of rigorous science is closely connected to an epistemological critique of modern science and its ontological presuppositions. By grounding this critical epistemology in a radical reflection on individual subjectivity Husserl, in many ways, continues the project initiated by Descartes and fundamentally reconceived by Kant. ⁴ Central to Husserl’s critique is the objection that positive science uncritically presupposes the natural world as its object, which leads to a misinterpretation of the epistemological problematic as an objectivating study of the worldly relation between consciousness and an external object rather than a radical reflection on the intentional relation of transcendental consciousness to the meaning it constitutes. In Husserl’s view, epistemologies based on objectivistic presuppositions attempt to reduce the complex intentional structure of consciousness to one or another strata of objective meaning it constitutes. Any such reduction, however, involves a basic category mistake that occludes the essence of consciousness and the meanings it constitutes, which also undermines the general conditions of the possibility of science and, consequently, results in one or another form of skeptical-relativism (psychologism, physicalism, historicism, sociologism, and so on). ⁵

For Husserl, the successful study of the intentional structure of consciousness requires the theory of the transcendental epochē and the method of eidetic intuition. The transcendental epochē (or transcendental reduction) suspends, brackets, or “neutralizes” the natural attitude – our natural everyday belief in the world – and the sciences founded on it in order to turn our attention back to the concrete stream of living acts of consciousness and their intentional structure, in which the meaning of the world finds its origin. ⁶ By investigating the intentional structures of these acts, the subjective activities functioning in different kinds of cognition can be clarified. These subjective activities include the operations of categorial intuition and eidetic intuition functioning in our logical and mathematical cognition, as well as other kinds of apriori cognition, even if the reality of these operations has been systematically occluded by modern nominalistic and naturalistic prejudices. ⁷ On the basis of a phenomenological analysis of categorial and eidetic intuition Husserl aims to clarify the transcendental possibility of both the analytic apriori of logic and mathematics and the material apriori of different regional ontologies. ⁸ With the epochē and eidetic intuition in hand, Husserl is also able to clarify the meaning of transcendental phenomenology itself as a science of the essence of the intentional structure of transcendentally reduced consciousness.

In contrast to Husserl’s epistemological critique of the objectivistic and nominalistic prejudices of the positive sciences, an instituting moment of critical theory, whether with Marx or the Frankfurt School, is the critique of philosophy understood as a unique science with its own special method of discovering apriori truths. In Marx’s formulation, after Hegel philosophy can no longer exist as an “independent brach of knowledge” but must rather be absorbed or sublated as a moment within a critical social theory grounded, in a quasi-empiricist manner, on contingently given social facts. ⁹ Marcuse’s classic 1937 essay “Philosophy and Critical Theory” repeats Marx’s basic intention and language: “Once critical theory had recognized the responsibility of economic conditions for the totality of the established world and comprehended the social framework in which reality was organized, philosophy became superfluous as an independent scientific discipline dealing with the structure of reality.” ¹⁰ For critical theory Husserl’s idea of rigorous science – with its claim to objectively valid apriori truth independent of history and politics – itself smacks of the kind of ideological mystification to be exposed through social critique. As evidence, critical theorists often point to the arbitrary metaphysical constructions of post-Husserlian phenomenologists like Max Scheler or Martin Heidegger. ¹¹ However, it should be noted that Husserl himself criticizes these thinkers for betraying his epistemological problematic and ideal of rigorous science for various forms of speculative philosophical anthropology. ¹²

Furthermore, an obvious Husserlian rejoinder to critical theory is that by dogmatically presupposing the natural attitude it fails to escape the paradoxical situation of modern philosophy it criticizes. As the Frankfurt School theorists themselves often note, this situation is dominated by the characteristic post-Hegelian antinomy between a self-liquidating nominalistic positivism and the irrationalist reaction of a mythico-poetic metaphysics. However, on the one hand, Horkheimer’s original project of interdisciplinary social science is itself based, as I argue in part two, on a quasi-positivistic version of Hegelian Marxism. But, on the other hand, the texts from the 1940s onward – exemplified most dramatically by Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – are increasingly dominated by a totalizing metacritique of reason, inspired heavily by irrationalist philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which identifies reason as such with a nominalistic and self-liquidating instrumental rationality that is projected back into archaic Greece. ¹³ It is true that Habermas attempts to overcome this antinomy by refounding Horkheimer’s early program of an interdisciplinary social science on the basis of a transformation of the tradition of transcendental philosophy through American pragmatism and British ordinary language philosophy, which should provide a more substantive, although sufficiently chastised, concept of communicative reason. ¹⁴ However, as I argue in part three, precisely the uncritical presupposition of the natural attitude by Habermas’s pragmatism ultimately leads to an epistemologically absurd anthropological relativism. By contrast, if it can be shown that Horkheimer’s and Habermas’s main criticisms of Husserl’s idea of rigorous philosophical science are based on misunderstandings, then the possibility of philosophically grounding critical social theory within a transcendental phenomenological framework can at least be opened to consideration.

Rigorous Science and Open System: Horkheimer’s Critique of Husserl

Horkheimer critically engages Husserl’s work, to greater or lesser extent and depth, at various points in the texts, from the late 1920s and 1930s, in which he defines the Frankfurt School’s early program of an interdisciplinary critical social science. Although sympathetic to the late Husserl’s critique of modern objectivistic science, Horkheimer decisively rejects Husserl’s concept of philosophy as a rigorous science with its own unique method for discovering apriori truths about the structure of consciousness. Horkheimer’s most extensive critique of Husserl’s concept of philosophical science is developed in the 1926 lecture series ICP. ¹⁵ In ICP Horkheimer understands Husserl’s phenomenology as a new kind of rationalist ontology that models its methods of justification, system-form, and standards of evidence on mathematics. I make two main points about Horkheimer's relation to Husserl in this section. First, I argue that Horkheimer’s reading of Husserl’s philosophy as a kind of rationalist ontology that returns to the classical deductivist ideal is entirely misleading, contradicting Husserl’s own methodological self-clarification of phenomenology, and that even Horkheimer’s more plausible claim that Husserl has an absolutist concept of indubitable evidence must be problematized, especially in light of Husserl’s distinction between adequate and apodictic evidence. Second, I also argue that Husserl’s understanding of transcendental phenomenology as an open, self-critical, and collaborative discipline is largely consistent with the early Horkheimer’s own idea of critical theory as an open system, even while it challenges some of Horkheimer’s quasi-positivist presuppositions.

Two False Criticism of Phenomenology: Deductivist System-Form and Absolute Evidence

In ICP Horkheimer reads Husserl, mainly in reference to Logical Investigations (LI), as putting forward a concept of philosophy that returns to the Cartesian deductivist ideal of science. Noting that Husserl wants to secure pure logic – which in an extended sense contains all of pure mathematics to form a mathesis universalis (universal mathematics) – from any empirical or experiential science (Erhfahrungswissenschaft), Horkheimer interprets Husserl as a kind of rationalist ontologist. This hold true, in Horkheimer’s view, even for Husserl’s later transcendental phenomenology, with its method of apriori research into essences. ¹⁶ This reading, however, downplays the fact that in LI the task of securing the autonomy and validity of the idea of pure logic and mathesis universalis is executed through the use of phenomenology – understood in the first edition of LI as descriptive psychology – to clarify the concept of logic. ¹⁷ Although descriptive psychology, a concept Husserl takes from Brentano, is not an empirical psychology, since it abstracts from the problem of the factual empirical genesis of psychic phenomena to focus on their essential structure, it is no doubt a theory of experience and its structures. Furthermore, with the development of the transcendental epochē Husserl provides a method of intuitively describing conscious experience not as a part of an uncritically presupposed world, as with descriptive psychology, but rather as the transcendental origin of the meaning of the world.

Horkheimer, however, largely ignores the subjective dimension of Husserl’s phenomenological method to focus on the project of securing the autonomy of a self-contained pure logic and the general method of eidetic research. Indeed, Horkheimer appears to equate the deductive methods of pure logic with the method of eidetic research, even though the latter has a much wider scope than the former and is presupposed by phenomenology itself. As Horkheimer writes: “One sees that for phenomenology’s first steps faith in the form of a rational system, for which mathematics is exemplary, has been entirely decisive.” ¹⁸ More specifically, Horkheimer claims that for Husserl the system-form of any rigorous science, including phenomenology, is that of a deductive mathematical system, whereas natural sciences are non-rigorous and unphilosophical because they involve vague, rather than mathematically exact, concepts. Horkheimer explains: “Husserl sees the system-form demanded for a rigorous science fulfilled only in pure mathematics, while he treats natural science, due to its empirical concept formation, as ‘vague’ and, therefore, as unphilosophical.” ¹⁹ This interpretation, however, elides LI’s method of investigating its object (phenomenology or descriptive psychology) with the method of its object of investigation (the deductive methods of pure logic). For although in LI Husserl does not adequately clarifying the epistemic status of his own phenomenological method, it is clear that the descriptive method of LI, while certainly eidetic, is basically different from the kinds of deductive methods whose possibility it aims to investigate.

Furthermore, Husserl later explicitly distances the method of phenomenology from the model of the deductive sciences. Indeed, the extensive discussion of phenomenological method in the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Ideas) makes clear that rigorous sciences cannot be dichotomously opposed to vague sciences. In fact, Husserl takes pains to distinguish two types of apriori eidetic – or, in other words, rigorous – sciences, which allows for the possibility of sciences that are simultaneously rigorous and “vague” (or “descriptive” or “morphological,” as Husserl also calls them). First, exact rigorous sciences, like mathematics, deal with exact essences constructed through processes of idealization, from which further results can be achieved through methods of deductive inference. Second, descriptive or morphological rigorous sciences deal with vague essences, whose generic structures are cognizable even while the individual instances that fall under these essential structures cannot be adequately captured by the idealized concepts of an axiomatic mathematical system. Such sciences cannot, consequently, involve any significant use of deductive technique. ²⁰ Phenomenology, for its part, is a rigorous – but not an exact – descriptive science of the vague essence of transcendental consciousness. Although it is not empirical psychology, neither is it a deductive science. Its purpose is to open a field of morphological research that proceeds to ever more concrete intuitive descriptions of the generic, although complex and multi-sided, essence of consciousness rather than to construct, through idealizing abstractions, a few intuitively self-evident axioms and principles of inference from which an unbounded number of deductive results ensue.

However, Horkheimer’s strongest criticism is not that Husserl uncritically endorses the deductive system-form of mathematics, but rather that Husserl’s concept of evidence is modelled on an idealized understanding of mathematical self-evidence. In particular, Horkheimer claims that Husserl’s concept of apriori self-evidence is absolutist, in the sense that is utterly indubitable and indefeasible in an orthodox Cartesian manner. This, according to Horkheimer, puts Husserl’s understanding of the apriori behind neo-Kantians like Hermann Cohen, who allow for a progressive universalization and relativization of scientific principles in order to account for developments such as non-Euclidean geometry, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics. ²¹ According to Horkheimer this neo-Kantian conception coincides better with his own idea of an open dialectical system in which principles are criticized and relativized as part of the process of their universalization. ²² I challenge this last contention in the next subsection. For now, however, I simply want to argue that Husserl’s concept of apodictic evidence must be distinguished from the orthodox Cartesian concept of indubitable evidence. Although all rigorous science, for Husserl, is apriori in method, neither exact nor morphological rigorous sciences have an absolute indubitability or indefeasibility that is immune to any criticism whatsoever. Rather the claims of apriori sciences are open to further reflection, criticism, and revision through the same method of eidetic intuition by which these claims are originally established. ²³

The self-critical nature of apriori evidence becomes particularly clear once Husserl, through phenomenological self-criticism, comes to make the distinction between adequate evidence and apodictic evidence. ²⁴ Already in his 1923/1924 lecture series First Philosophy Husserl distinguishes between these two concepts of evidence, although in this text he still consider them to be extensionally equivalent. First, adequate evidence means the completeness or all-sidedness of the evidence. With a perceptual object, for example, the evidence is adequate when it has been clearly and distinctly perceived from all possible viewpoints, so that adequate evidence of an object would be the infinite manifold of all its possible perceptual profiles or adumbrations (Abschattungen). Second, apodictic evidence means the necessity and certainty of a truth, which is oriented more toward rational insights into general conceptual or eidetic truths rather than the perceptual evidence of empirical truths. ²⁵ In Cartesian Meditations, based on Husserl's 1929 Paris lectures, Husserl comes to criticizes his earlier equating of these two concepts. Now the apodicticity of evidence is no longer considered to necessarily entail its adequacy. ²⁶ Rather apodictic evidence is indubitable only in the sense that it is apriori or, in other words, its validity is independent of the empirical course of experience or empirical matters-of-fact. This independence is grounded in the method of eidetic variation, which depends only on the imaginative variation of factual possibilities to discern the invariant elements that constitute the meaning of different generic types of being. ²⁷ However, absolute indubitability – or, in other words, adequacy – does not immediately follow since the results of eidetic variation can remain one-side and are, therefore, open to possible revision through further clarification and criticism by the same method of eidetic variation. ²⁸ Nevertheless, the concept of adequate evidence can still function as a kind of regulative idea, in the Kantian sense, of an infinitely perfect and complete apodictic evidence. This idea governs the telos of our cognitive striving, without itself ever being fully realized, by orienting the process of apriori self-criticism of our achieved apodictic evidence toward a fuller and more complete cognition of the truth.

Transcendental Phenomenology and “Open System”

As mentioned above, Horkheimer considers the apriorism of phenomenology to contradict his own idea of philosophy as an open system. I would argue, however, that Husserl’s concepts of phenomenological research, self-criticism, and systematization are not as distant from the idea of open system as Horkheimer imagines. One of Horkheimer’s best discussion of the concept of open system is contained in the 1935 essay “On the Problem of Truth.” In this text Horkheimer draws on Hegel to develop a path between the false alternative of either a subjectivistic relativism or a metaphysical absolutism, the latter of which he considers characteristic of idealism. Horkheimer sketches his system-concept as follows:

Recognition of the conditional character of every isolated view and rejection of its absolute claim to truth does not destroy this conditional knowledge; rather, it is incorporated into the system of truth at any given time as a conditioned, one-sided, and isolated view. Through nothing but this continuous delimitation and correction of partial truths, this process itself evolves its proper content as knowledge of limited insights in their limits and connection. ²⁹

Unlike Hegel, however, for Horkheimer such a system is always an open project and never a completed task. The problem with Hegel’s concept of a closed self-reflexive dialectical system is that it presupposes the idealist postulate that “concept and being are in truth the same, and therefore that all fulfillment can take place in the pure medium of spirit.” ³⁰ In regard to this aspect of openness, Horkheimer’s open system is perhaps closer to Kant’s concept of system as a regulative idea that projects an imaginary point (focus imaginarius) in which all our cognition is unified in order to better orient the organization of our actual concrete research. ³¹

Although Horkheimer considers his materialist transformation of Hegel’s concept of system to contradict the apriorism of transcendental phenomenology, there are reasons to think the situation is more complex. First, it should be mentioned that although Husserl puts forward the idea of a system of regional ontologies that provides the basic categories of the empirical sciences, these categories are so generic that they cannot determine whether some specific mathematical theory (classical mechanics, relativity theory, quantum theory, etc.) is empirical adequate for the region in question. In other words, Husserl does not adhere to the kind of strong foundationalism that Horkheimer attributes to him. ³² Second, Husserl’s reconceptualization of adequate evidence as a regulative idea necessary for the progressive perfection and completion of our apodictic cognition, like Horkheimer’s open system, is reminiscent of Kant’s concept of system as a regulative idea. Indeed, when Husserl insists that we “must go back to the ‘things themselves’” he is indicting that phenomenology is a method of investigating the pre-predicative operational subjectivity at the origins of the meaning of our concepts rather than a finished system of concepts – whether deductively static or dialectically self-developing – that can be directly identified with reality. ³³ Third, Husserl makes clear that his idea of rigorous science calls for a collective project of researchers, which involves mutual criticism and continual research into an open field of new problems. ³⁴ Consequently, he has a bottom-up concept of system, one which builds up a provisional architectonic from individual concrete phenomenological researches and which is open and revisable, even on the eidetic level, in light of new research. In other words, Husserl’s system-concept is neither a deductive system of the classic rationalist type nor a top-down synthetic construction from a single first principle of the German idealist type. Indeed, for Husserl there is no single highest principle, except for what he calls “the principle of principles,” which is simply the imperative to recover the concrete subjective sources and operations in which the meaning of our concepts originate. ³⁵ Although it involves apriori research into essences, Husserl’s phenomenology envisages an open, revisable, and collaborative system, which, at least in a broad sense, is not in conflict with Horkheimer’s concept of an open system.

It is true, nonetheless, that Husserl challenges Horkheimer’s concept of philosophy by maintaining an essential distinction between the method of philosophy and that of empirical science. As Horkheimer elucidates in his 1931 inaugural address at the Frankfurt Institute on “The Present Situation in Social Philosophy,” a main aim of his program of interdisciplinary social science is to overcome the radical separation and isolation, in the post-Hegelian situation, of philosophical research into foundational ontological problems from the concrete empirical research of the positive sciences. In opposition to this division between philosophy and science, Horkheimer writes:

[T]he task is to do what all true researchers have always done: namely, to pursue their larger philosophical questions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods, to revise and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work, and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger context. With this approach, no yes-or-no answers arise to the philosophical questions. Instead, these questions themselves become integrated into the empirical research process; their answers lie in the advance of objective knowledge, which itself affects the form of the questions. ³⁶

Although this may be an appealing view of philosophy and its relation to concrete empirical research, the specificity of philosophy’s contribution to this research agenda remains rather indeterminate. Horkheimer refers to the pursuit of philosophical questions on the basis of “the most precise scientific methods” and to the development of “new methods,” but fails to indicate whether the philosophical component of this program itself has a specific method, distinct in kind from the empirical and analytic methods of the positive sciences, and, if so, what this method is. In a subsequent essay Horkheimer rather ambivalently indicates that the techniques of philosophy and empirical science do differ while also claiming that he “does not recognize any difference between science and philosophy as such.” ³⁷

This ambivalence is partly due to Horkheimer’s lingering adherence to a variant of positivism or at least some important positivistic principles. Although it may sound odd, given their reputation as radical critics of all forms of positivism, in reality both Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s most basic epistemological beliefs were deeply influenced by the psychologistic variant of neo-Kantianism, heavily inflected by Ernst Mach’s version of positivism, of their common Doktorvater Han Cornelius. ³⁸ While certainly critical of the transcendentalist framework of Cornelius’s philosophy, a main feature of Horkheimer’s materialist reading of modern philosophy, developed in a series of lectures from 1925 to 1930, is his attempt to rehabilitate the tradition of bourgeois empiricism – including figures such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, the French philosophes, Mandeville, and Hume – as a form of radical critique of metaphysics and feudal-absolutist society. ³⁹ Horkheimer takes these thinkers as something of a model for his own materialist critique of contemporary neo-Romanticist and irrationalist metaphysics, whose rising influence he connects to an increasingly monopolized, militaristic, and authoritarian form of capitalism. ⁴⁰ Indeed, Horkheimer’s mature critique of twentieth century positivism is not so much that it adheres to the empiricist principle that the only source of any material knowledge is sense experience, but rather, first, that its concept of sense experience is socially and historically unmediated and, second, that it has lost its critical edge insofar as, in contrast to classical empiricism, its doctrine of protocol sentences substitutes the analysis of publicly available existential statements for the analysis of concrete sense experience. ⁴¹ This epistemological positivism, of a historicized sort, is complemented by an ethical hedonism and historicism that denies the possibility of rationally grounding ethical principles. ⁴² Although it is true that in the second half of the 1930s Horkheimer became more critical of contemporary positivism and began to reevaluate the rationalist tradition, his failure to carry out a systematic critical renewal the concept of reason – which would have required a more sustained and serious engagement with Husserl’s work – means that his opposition to the positivist self-liquidation of reason eventually, in the 1940s and under Adorno’s influence, took on the shape of a totalizing metacritique of reason that strongly echoes the irrationalist tendencies he earlier criticized. ⁴³ However, while subsequent developments in philosophy have tended to challenge Horkheimer’s quasi-positivistic presuppositions, the reading of transcendental phenomenology outlined above raises the possibility of recovering the basic intention of his concept of open system on a more convincing philosophical foundation.

Rigorous Science and Human Interests: Habermas’s Critique of Husserl

Jürgen Habermas’s engagement with transcendental phenomenology is focused mainly on rethinking the concept of the lifeworld, which Husserl thematizes in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Crisis) and related texts from the mid-1930s. This dimension of Husserl’s thought is largely ignored in the critiques by the first generation Frankfurt School thinkers. In the course of this engagement Habermas develops some independent criticisms of Husserl’s idea of philosophical science, beginning with his 1965 Frankfurt inaugural address reproduced in KHI. After outlining Habermas’s criticism in KHI, I offer two counter-criticisms. First, that Habermas’s interpretation of Husserl as reviving a metaphysics of cosmological ambitions is based on a concept of “post-metaphysical thinking” that basically distorts the very meaning of transcendental philosophy. Second, that Habermas’s attempt to address the weaknesses of Horkheimer’s concept of reason, with its positivist dimensions, through a dialogue with American pragmatism and British ordinary language philosophy is itself not immune to the charge of skeptical-relativism. In particular, I argue that Habermas’s grounding of his most basic theoretical distinctions in a pragmatist evolutionary epistemology can be understood as variant of what Husserl calls anthropological relativism.

Transcendental Phenomenology Between Metaphysics and Pragmatism

In the inaugural address Habermas develops a critique of Husserl’s idea of philosophical science that is independent of earlier Frankfurt School criticisms. Rather than interpreting transcendental phenomenology as a new kind of deductivist rationalist ontology, Habermas makes the broader claim that Husserl remains within the limits of “traditional theory” insofar as he aims at pure theoretical truth independent of any practical human interest. Given Habermas’s interest in the political significance of Kant’s practically oriented transcendental philosophy, this criticism could be interpreted as the claim that Husserl falls behind Kant’s cosmopolitan idea of philosophy, which unifies the highest interests of humanity – of which the theoretical interest is only one – within the concept of the highest good. ⁴⁴ And, as earlier Frankfurt School theorists like Marcuse already pointed out, certain statements of Husserl – particularly in relatively early works like Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911) – do provide some evidence for this claim insofar as they tend to formulate transcendental phenomenology as a science of essences that remains entirely neutral on questions of existence. ⁴⁵

Despite the ambiguity of some of these early formulations, Husserl’s later position in the Crisis decisively moves beyond purely disinterested “traditional theory” insofar as it centres the themes of historical-cultural crisis and renewal. Yet Habermas is fully aware of this transformation, directly quoting from the “Vienna Lecture” (1935), where Husserl writes that philosophy is “a new sort of praxis . . . whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal scientific reason, according to norms of truth of all forms, to transform it from the bottom up into a new humanity made capable of an absolute self-responsibility on the basis of absolute theoretical insights.” ⁴⁶ Therefore, Habermas’s critique cannot simply be, as with Marcuse, that transcendental phenomenology lacks ethical and political significance. And, indeed, looking more closely, we find that Habermas instead attacks Husserl for attempting to radically renew an ancient, pre-modern ideal of theoretical reason, which sets itself the task of rigorously grounding not only positive science but also moral, ethical, and other value principles.

In Habermas’s view this expansive idea of theoretical reason can only mean an impossible return to ancient metaphysical and cosmological aspirations within a modern transcendental guise. Indeed, the epigraph of the published version of the inaugural address is a passage from Schelling that identifies pure theoretical knowledge with metaphysical speculation. For Habermas, however, an essential element of modernity is a critical demystification of the claims of transcendent metaphysics and their ideological functions, a process which brings to conscious awareness the essential connection between knowledge and practical interests. As he writes:

Contrary to Husserl’s expectations, objectivism is eliminated not through the power of renewed theoria but through demonstrating what it conceals: the connection of knowledge and interest. Philosophy remains true to its tradition by renouncing it. The insight that the truth of statements is linked in the last analysis to the intention of the good and true life can be preserved only on the ruins of ontology. ⁴⁷

Furthermore, in Habermas’s view, there is a fundamental tension between Husserl’s attempt to ground his renewal of the idea of pure theory within the methodological strictures of transcendental phenomenology and the substantive ethical and practical results he wants to derive from this idea:

Theory in the sense of the classical tradition only had an impact on life because it was thought to have discovered in the cosmic order an ideal world structure, including the prototype for the order of the human world. Only as cosmology was theoria also capable of orienting human action. Thus Husserl cannot expect self-formative processes to originate in a phenomenology that, as transcendental philosophy, purifies the classical theory of its cosmological contents . . . Theory had educational and cultural implications not because it had freed knowledge from interest. To the contrary, it did so because it derived pseudonormative power from the concealment of its actual interest. ⁴⁸

In other words, by striving to renew the idea of pure theoretical knowledge through transcendental phenomenology Husserl, in Habermas’s view, falls into the contradiction of attempting to derive substantive cultural and practical content out of a transcendental critique of knowledge, when such a derivation would require a genuinely speculative metaphysical framework. Although Habermas shortly came to replace the epistemological framework of KHI with his formal pragmatics and theory of communicative action, his critique of Husserl’s concept of phenomenology as a rigorous science remains largely unchanged. Several issues, however, can be raised with this critique of Husserl.

First, it is based on a reading of Husserl that is highly prejudiced by Habermas’s peculiar reading of modern philosophy, which is expressed in his concepts of “post-metaphysical thinking” and the “philosophy of consciousness.” This way of conceiving the history of philosophy allow for only two fundamental philosophical choices: either a speculative metaphysics that returns to the cosmological aspirations of the ancients – which in modern post-Cartesian philosophy takes the form of the “philosophy of consciousness” – or a “post-metaphysical thinking” that necessarily has a naturalistic and pragmatist form. ⁴⁹ The result is that Habermas gives a very metaphysical reading of the tradition of transcendental philosophy, one which is perhaps more fitting for Fichte (and German Idealism more generally) than for the most valuable methodological insights of Kant and Husserl. This interpretive framework obscures the nature of transcendental philosophy as a non-empirical and non-metaphysical investigation into the essential structures of consciousness that constitute the meaning of any form of objectivity. It also conceals the fact that the critique of speculative metaphysics, just as much as the critique of positivism and pragmatism, has always been at the centre of modern transcendental philosophy. This critique of metaphysics, nonetheless, in no way prevents transcendental investigation into the essential structure of the subjective sources of our epistemic, ethical, or aesthetic validity-claims and, consequently, a theoretical grounding of such claims that is independent of the cosmological problematic of pre-critical metaphysics.

Furthermore, Habermas’s concept of metaphysics is itself rather imprecise and equivocal. He fails, in particular, to distinguish between a pre-critical speculative metaphysics and a critical ontology whose basic methods, principles, and concepts have undergone transcendental criticism. ⁵⁰ Consequently, he fails to note that Husserl’s philosophy is not, in the first instance, an ontology or metaphysics, certainly not in the traditional sense of a speculative theory of being. Husserl rather reserves the designation “first philosophy” for phenomenology, which carries out a critical epistemology clarification of different ontological categories, and reduces metaphysics – as a comprehensive philosophical interpretation of concrete being – to the rank of “second philosophy.” ⁵¹ This means that it is methodologically impermissible to begin with dogmatically assumed ontological premises from which a cosmology is speculatively concocted in order to explain our place in the universe in a way that satisfies our prior value commitments. ⁵² Nonetheless, Husserl still allows for a phenomenologically clarified metaphysics, as “second philosophy,” that can critically revise and rework the received ontology presupposed by the established positive sciences – a possibility than Habermas dogmatically dismisses, even though this may be a necessary task for a critical social science capable of comprehending the complex intertwining of economic, social, political, and ecological crises currently troubling our world. ⁵³

Second, Habermas fails to see that the method of transcendental phenomenology is logically independent from the ontological presupposition in which Husserl sometimes articulates it. Habermas insists that any transcendental philosophy, including Husserl’s, must presuppose a transcendental ego with a special ontological status that makes it ontologically independent from worldly being so that it can constitute this being. It is true that as evidence he could refer to Husserl discussion of the “annihilation of the world” in Ideas, which suggests that the transcendental ego is a domain of absolute being that can exist independently of the existence or non-existence of the empirical world. ⁵⁴ However, I would argued that the ontological presuppositions of Husserl’s original formulation of the epochē – which he later comes to call the Cartesian way – are logically independent of the epochē’s basic methodological operation of the neutrality modification, which suspends participation in the validity-positings of consciousness in order to study the essential structure of consciousness in an ontologically neutral way. ⁵⁵ In Husserl’s later formulations, which culminate in the way of the lifeworld, he more clearly conceives the epochē as a radical problematization of the sedimented and traditionalized meaning of the world, including that of modern natural science, rather than any hypothetical “annihilation” of the world’s existential status. ⁵⁶ This approach also, in my view, enables Husserl to undertake a self-criticism that eventually leads to a questioning of the implicit dualistic ontological framework in which he originally conceived the epochē. ⁵⁷

Third, Habermas’s linguistic-pragmatic transformation of transcendental philosophy, for its part, also makes certain ontological claims. However, since it lacks a critical epistemological method these claims remain dogmatic assertions. Perhaps most significantly Habermas himself early on put forward a consensus theory truth, inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce’s analysis of truth as the consensus of the community of researchers, but later came to admit that this can be understood as a form of linguistic idealism. To counter the idealism implicit in the consensus theory Habermas, in his mature thought, insists that language users must make the pragmatic presupposition of an external world in order for their referential validity-claims to be meaningful. ⁵⁸ This external world realism not only saves Habermas from his earlier consensus theory but can also be contrasted to transcendental idealism. There are, however, two main difficulties with this position. First, it implausibly reduces the meaning of the world to a pragmatic presupposition of the validity-claims raised in everyday language use. The result is that Habermas ignores the phenomenological fact that linguistic meanings as such, and the meaning of the world in particular, are themselves founded on the pre-predicative level of intentional experience in its perceptual, kinaesthetic, and affective dimensions. ⁵⁹ Second, this marginalization of fundamental phenomenological facts is connected to the way in which Habermas’s pragmatic positing of the external world is basically dogmatic insofar as it refuses to problematize the existence of the world in order to investigate how its meaning is constituted in transcendental consciousness. Even if Habermas verbally affirms the Kantian problem of a transcendental critique of the received world concept, his transformation of transcendental philosophy into formal pragmatics, and the associated method of “rational reconstruction” of empirical-anthropological conditions, uncritically presupposes both the everyday meaning of the world and its determination by positive sciences like sociology and psychology. Indeed, following Peirce, Habermas rejects any method of doubt, intended to attain properly apriori transcendental conditions, for the pragmatic assumption that most of our accumulated knowledge is correct, although it is possible that any particular knowledge claim can be problematized and perhaps shown to be wrong. ⁶⁰

Fourth, it is incorrect to claim that Husserl attempts to purify philosophy from any interest whatsoever. Indeed, philosophy founds itself on a pure theoretical interest, which is necessary for the clarification and renewal of the ultimate meaning or telos of all human interests. ⁶¹ The theoretical interest is itself a historical accomplishment that flows back into the lifeworld to become a cultural tradition with a significance for the future of all of humanity. ⁶² It is the reality of the theoretical idea as a living cultural practice that allows the phenomenology of the lifeworld to be truly critical and not just a relativistic hermeneutics. By contrast, although with his theory of communicative action Habermas praises the late Husserl’s turn to the lifeworld for thematizing the pre-theoretical practices on which the sciences are founded, he rejects Husserl's claim that the lifeworld itself needs a transcendental clarification in the subjective operations that constitute it. Habermas rather turns to pragmatism for an elucidation of the structure of the lifeworld and lifeworld practices, the linguistic structure of which already implicitly contains certain idealizing presuppositions. ⁶³ Although Habermas is right to emphasize the idealizing presuppositions of everyday linguistic practices, he attributes to Husserl too sharp an opposition between lifeworld practices and scientific idealizations. For in his analysis of the origin of mathematical idealization in lifeworld technological practices Husserl suggests that these practices themselves already implicitly contain certain practical idealizations that are explicitly thematized and infinitized by the theoretical attitude of the sciences. ⁶⁴ In contrast, by denying the possibility of a thematization of practical idealizations by a pure theoretical interest, Habermas’s pragmatism potentially falls into relativistic consequences.

Relativistic Implications of Habermas’s Pragmatist Interpretation of the Transcendental

This brings us to the question of whether Habermas’s naturalistic pragmatism can theoretically justify itself while denying the existence of any pure theoretical interest. Perhaps a good place to begin is, again, with Habermas’s early epistemological program in KHI and its attempt to ground the universal validity of critical reason in the concept of knowledge constitutive interests. Once the difficulties with this position are established, the results can be easily extended to the similar position Habermas’s later develops within the framework of his theory of communicative action.

The concept of knowledge constitutive interests is key to the epistemological framework of KHI. Habermas identifies three different basic human interests, which he considers anthropological invariants, that orient the development of our theoretical knowledge: technical control of nature, mutual hermeneutical understanding, and emancipation from oppressive social structures. In Habermas’s terminology these interests have a “quasi-transcendental” status, which means that they are neither logically deducible from first principles nor empirically verifiable, but rather have a “metalogical necessity” based in their pragmatic unavoidability. ⁶⁵ However, on closer examination, it turns out that this “metalogical necessity” is grounded in a philosophical anthropology of a naturalistic and Darwinian kind. Habermas, for example, claims that: “The achievements of the transcendental subject have their basis in the natural history of the human species.” ⁶⁶ This pragmatic evolutionism is further elaborated in Habermas’s “Postscript” to KHI: “The hypothetical construct which I call knowledge-constitutive or knowledge-guiding interest is supposed to enable us to understand the systematic (though conditional) embeddedness of discursively produced theoretical knowledge in the practice of a form of life which can only reproduce itself with the aid of potentially true statements.” ⁶⁷ The concept of knowledge constitutive human interests, therefore, is intended to bridge Habermas’s epistemology with his sociology. By demonstrating that a form of theoretical cognition is a necessary condition of the social reproduction of a practical interest necessary for human survival, Habermas can root knowledge in social life while showing that the latter also functionally depends on the former. However, insofar as Habermas considers this relation of mutual dependence an adequate epistemological clarification of theoretical knowledge, beyond its empirical sociological explanation, fundamental difficulties arise.

For the result is an evolutionary epistemology that gives an anthropological interpretation of the transcendental, a position which Husserl already fundamentally criticized in the first part of LI, the “Prolegomena to Pure Logic” (PTPL). In PTPL Husserl develops the concept of anthropologism as a form of relativism that relativizes truth to the human species as such. ⁶⁸ In Husserl’s view, the relativization of truth to the human species as a whole is just as logically incoherent as any other kind of relativism since it is based on the same fundamental category mistake that elides the necessity and apriority of logical truths with the contingency and aposteriority of truths about some class of matters of fact (even very general ones about human nature as such). This results in insoluble paradoxes. For example, the same proposition could be both truth and false, violating the law of non-contradiction, insofar as there may be two different species of cognitive creatures with fundamentally different cognitive apparatuses. Or a true theory – even, hypothetically, the anthropologistic theory itself – could cease to be truth if the human species were to evolve in a way that changed it cognitive apparatus appropriately. Furthermore, in chapter 9 of the PTPL, Husserl concretizes his critique to precisely the kind of pragmatic evolutionary naturalism Habermas relies on, examples of which Husserl finds in thinkers like Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, and Han Cornelius. ⁶⁹ This kind of evolutionary epistemology is simply a variant of anthropological relativism insofar as it reduces the ideal validity of theoretical logic to certain contingent matters of fact about how the cognitive apparatus of the human species has been optimized in practical logic as a technology evolved in service of human survival. Husserl’s basic point is that if human cognition, as a practical activity, has any cognitive value, this is because it embodies certain ideal forms of cognition, studied by pure theoretical logic, that are equally valid for any other – human or non-human – form of consciousness, entirely regardless of the question of whether any of these material realizations of ideal forms happen to have any evolutionary advantage in a given environmental context. Consequently, the validity of these ideal forms themselves cannot be bestowed by reference to the evolutionary history of the human cognitive apparatus.

Although Habermas eventually abandoned the framework of KHI and its terminology of knowledge constituting human interests, his later theory of communicative action ultimately relies on a similar pragmatist approach. When in Truth and Justification Habermas returns, decades later, to epistemological problems, he focuses on defending two fundamental theses that already determined KHI’s framework: first, a weak or non-reductionistic naturalism; second, a transcendental-pragmatic epistemological realism. By combining a transcendental-pragmatic realism with a weak naturalism Habermas aims to avoid both the linguistic idealism of Wittgenstein’s language games or Heidegger’s world disclosure and also the reduction of meaning to a naturalistic interpretation of language, which threatens to liquidate the concept of reason altogether. ⁷⁰ Avoiding linguistic idealism is particularly significant for Habermas because his own formal pragmatics, the theoretical core of his theory of communicative action, draws on Wittgenstein to avoid the sort of Platonic theories of meaning found in Husserl or Frege. ⁷¹ To counter the relativism implicit in radical linguistic contextualism – as well as the idealist aspects of his own earlier consensus theory of truth – Habermas now insists that the meaning of truth, at least in the theoretical realm, involves the pragmatic positing of an external world. As he writes: “a correctly expressed proposition is true not because the rules governing its use reflect the consensus or worldview of a given linguistic community, but because, applied correctly, these rules warrant the rational acceptability of the sentence.” ⁷² The problem, however, is how we can know that these rules truly warrant the rational acceptability of a proposition by putting us into relation with the real world. Although Habermas refers to how theoretical claims already function in lifeworld practices, he does little to elucidate or describe the nature of the evidences given in these practices. ⁷³

More fundamentally, Habermas is apparently insufficiently aware that the problem of linguistic idealism is not identical to the problem of skeptical-relativism implicit in anthropologism, particularly of a pragmatist and naturalistic type. ⁷⁴ Otherwise it is difficult to explain why he still maintains a pragmatic evolutionary grounding of his basic theoretical distinctions. Indeed, he argues that an advantage of his linguistic-pragmatic reinterpretation of transcendental conditions is that it makes meaning compatible with a weak or non-reductionist naturalism. This kind of naturalism merely affirms “the basic background assumption that the biological endowment and the cultural way of life of Homo sapiens have a ‘natural’ origin and can in principle be explained in term of evolutionary theory.” ⁷⁵ However, if this weak naturalism is meant to go beyond a small piece of empirical biology and fulfil epistemological tasks, it simply falls back into the skeptical-relativism that plagues the position of KHI. In epistemological matters, at least, a hypothetical evolutionary narrative cannot substitute for concrete phenomenological description of the structure of the actual subjective operations underpinning basic theoretical distinctions.

Transcendental Phenomenology as a Necessary Condition of Critical Social Theory

The previous two parts have argued that both Horkheimer’s and Habermas’s criticisms of Husserl’s idea of philosophical science are misplaced. This failure is rooted in a failure to grasp the significance of the project of transcendental phenomenology, interpreted by both critical theorists in an overly metaphysical way. Husserl’s primary significance, in my view, is to have renewed the tradition of transcendental philosophy, as epistemological critique independent of any metaphysical or naturalistic presuppositions, in a way that is open, self-critical, and collaborative. Reading transcendental phenomenology in this way opens the possibility of using it – in a way analogous to how Habermas uses American pragmatism and British ordinary language philosophy – to rethink the philosophical foundations of Horkheimer’s program of an interdisciplinary critical social science by providing it with the more differentiated, complex, and substantive concept of reason that Horkheimer gestures toward without ever systematically developing. The advantage of such an approach is that it can avoid the theoretical difficulties of both Horkheimer’s historicized positivism and Habermas’s linguistic-pragmatic reduction of transcendentality.

As argued above, transcendental phenomenology is consistent with the program of critical social theory in some specific ways that have often been denied. First, its theory of apriori evidence is largely consistent with Horkheimer’s concept of an open dialectical system, even if it rejects the empiricist presuppositions that can lead Horkheimer in a nihilistic, relativistic, and ultimately irrationalist direction. Second, the late Husserl’s turn to the phenomenology of the lifeworld is – contrary to Habermas’s objections – consistent with the very idea of social critique insofar as it expands phenomenological method to encompass a critical reflection, guided by the interest in theoretical truth, on the historical origins of the crisis of philosophy, and modern culture more generally, in the loss of the relation of the practice of theoretical knowledge to the rest of the lifeworld and its non-theoretical practices. Indeed, a phenomenological clarification of the lifeworld origins of the evidential structures, validity status, and inter-relations of the different human interests – which must also include the pure theoretical interest – and types of rationality that Habermas distinguishes could avoid the relativistic consequences of his evolutionary pragmatic explanation of these distinctions.

On a very general plane, transcendental phenomenology can help clarify a concept of reason suitable to critical social theory by clearly distinguishing between the level of philosophical reflection and the level of empirical social theory. While the former uses phenomenological method to radically reflect on the subjective origins of the meaning of the fundamental epistemological, ethical, and ontological presuppositions of social critique, the latter makes use of these presuppositions, and more specific empirical methods, to construct a critical knowledge of social reality. In Horkheimer and Habermas, however, the properly philosophical level tends to collapse into the empirical level, a failure that ultimately originates in the inability of their quasi-positivist or pragmatist presuppositions to offer an adequate critique of the natural attitude and the implicit nominalistic presuppositions of the modern empiricist concept of science. This failure to integrate a properly critical epistemology within critical social theory can only result in an interpretation of the epistemological problem in objectivistic terms – even if of a highly historically and socially mediated sort – and, consequently, a fall into one or another form of skeptical-relativism.

Nonetheless, it must be admitted that Husserl can appear to make the opposite mistake of collapsing critical social knowledge into the level of philosophical reflection. In the Crisis, for example, Husserl overextends the scope of his epistemological critique of the modern mathematical sciences by attempting to derive an entire critical theory of modernity out of it, when what is also required is the development of a set of much more concrete social and historical categories that can help situate this epistemological critique. That is, the Crisis’s concepts of sedimentation, superficialization, formalization, idealization, technicization, substructuration, and so on must be supplemented by and articulated with a phenomenological clarification of categories like the commodity-form, capital, the state, class, ideology, bureaucracy, and so on, which would allow for a critical knowledge of the larger social and political crisis of modernity in which the crisis of the sciences and philosophical reason that Husserl exclusively thematizes is situated and of which it forms an essential part – but still only a part. Such an approach could bring historical and social concreteness to Husserl’s critique of the sciences while also providing critical theory with a more detailed and convincing analysis of the inner evidential structure of these sciences and a clearer understanding of itself as a form of knowledge. Although any such synthesis of transcendental phenomenology and critical social theory no doubt poses a deep challenge and contains many difficult problems, at least some important work in this direction has already been accomplished by thinkers working in the tradition of phenomenological Marxism, such as Tran Duc Thao, Enzo Paci, Michel Henry, or, more recently, Ian H. Angus. ⁷⁶ In this paper I have limited myself to the more modest task of arguing that Husserl’s idea of transcendental phenomenology as a rigorous science is consistent with the basic project of critical social theory and, indeed, a necessary element of this project’s philosophical coherence and self-clarification, even if transcendental phenomenology alone is insufficient for the construction of a complete and empirically adequate critical social theory of modernity and contemporary social life.