Clarifying the Foucault - Habermas debate: Morality, ethics, and 'normative foundations'

Philosophy and Social Criticism

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 287-314

  King, Matthew ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Cryptonormativity; Discourse ethics; Foundations; J rgen Habermas; Michel Foucault; Truth

Indexed keywords

EID: 61349195732     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453708100232     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Barry Allen, 'Foucault and Modern Political Philosophy', in Jeremy Moss (ed.) The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 164-98 (164);
2. hereafter cited as FMP.
3. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 276; hereafter cited as PDM.
4. Habermas, PDM, p. 284.
5. Allen, FMP, p. 164.
6. These writers include several contributors to Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (eds) Foucault Contra Habermas (London: Sage, 1999), particularly James Tully;
7. Wendy Brown, 'Genealogical Polities', in Moss (ed.) The Later Foucault;
8. and Real Fillion, 'Freedom, Responsibility, and the "American Foucault"', Philosophy and Social Criticism 30(1) (2004): 115-26;
9. hereafter cited as FRA.
10. Brown, 'Genealogical Polities', p. 46.
11. In an interview, Foucault says: 'I am quite interested in [Habermas'] work, although I know he completely disagrees with my views. While I, for my part, tend to be a little more in agreement with what he says.' Michel Foucault, 'The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom', in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: the New Press, 1997), pp. 281-302 (298).
12. It should be noted that, on Habermas' terms, discourse ethics is not an ethics at all but rather a moral theory. Habermas points out that 'it would be more accurate to speak of a "discourse theory of morality," but [he] retain[s] the term "discourse ethics," which has become established usage.' Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. vii; hereafter cited as JA.
13. ibid., p. 176.
14. ibid., p. 126.
15. ibid., p. 127.
16. ibid.
17. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, ed. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1986), p. 171.
18. See note 6.
19. Michel Foucault, 'On the Genealogy of Ethics', in Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, pp. 255-80 (263);
20. hereafter cited as OGE.
21. ibid.
22. Michel Foucault, 'Politics and Ethics: an Interview', in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 373-80 (378-9).
23. Michel Foucault, 'The Return of Morality', in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 242-54 (253-4);
24. hereafter cited as ROM.
25. This sounds like a typically liberal concern, but liberals are typically concerned to keep separate ethics and politics - and this, as I will explain, is just what Foucault does not do.
26. Allen, FMP, p. 173.
27. Fons Elders (ed.) Reflexive Waters: The Basic Concerns of Mankind (London: Souvenir Press, 1974), pp. 173-4.
28. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 25;
29. hereafter cited as TCA-1.
30. ibid., p. 286.
31. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987), pp. 383-96.
32. See Habermas, TCA-1, pp. 274-9.
33. See, for example, Habermas, JA, pp. 5-8.
34. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. C. Lenhardt and S. Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 65;
35. hereafter cited as MCC.
36. ibid., p. 66.
37. ibid., pp. 79-82.
38. Karl-Otto Apel, 'Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia', in Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr (eds) The Communicative Ethics Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 23-59 (42); hereafter cited as EIC.
39. ibid.
40. ibid., p. 43.
41. However, as Habermas makes clear in a later article, where justification is concerned, principle (D) has priority (as, of course, it must, as the foundational principle of discourse ethics) over condition (U): condition (U) must be justified by appeal to principle (D). See Jürgen Habermas, 'A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality', in The Inclusion of the Other, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 43-4.
42. Apel, EIC, p. 46.
43. Habermas, MCC, p. 85.
44. ibid., p. 86.
45. This, I think, is a fitting Habermasian response to Real Fillion's rejection of what he characterizes as Habermas' demand of accountability and consistency from Foucault, which he attributes to a 'discomfort [that] stems from a concern about the relevance of critique in the wider culture. . . . Unsure of the relevance of our "radical theorizing" (we know we are right, but is anyone listening?), we are especially sensitive to the standards and canons of consistency we apply to our work. We cannot afford to be both irrelevant and frivolous';
46. Fillion, FRA, p. 121. On Habermas' terms, we cannot be, at the same time, both irrelevant and right, at least concerning substantive political matters, including the matters (as I will argue) Foucault's work is concerned with.
47. See, for instance, James Tully, 'To Think and Act Differently: Foucault's Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas' Theory', in Ashenden and Owen (eds) Foucault Contra Habermas, pp. 90-142 (115).
48. The point, of course, is not to blame politicians (who are, after all, not a separate, morally degenerate class of persons) for this; the point of the critical social theory founded on the moral philosophy is that modern societies are structured in ways that compel this kind of behavior.
49. Note that it is not my purpose to defend Habermas' normative foundations. I am not convinced that the impossibility of justifying failure to adhere to the principles of argumentation in general entails that failure to adhere to those principles under some particular circumstances, and perhaps under quite a wide range of circumstances, cannot be justified. But that is beside the point of the present article.
50. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 339;
51. hereafter cited as PMF.
52. Foucault, OGE, p. 231.
53. Miller, PMF, p. 339.
54. Allen, FMP, p. 165.
55. ibid., p. 192.
56. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 61-6.
57. Allen brushes off the most obvious objections thusly: 'If, as Oakeshott said of J. S. Mill, his work amounts to a muddled and unconfident exploration of the political theory of collectivism under cover of the rhetoric of individualism, one might say of Foucault, conversely, that his comprises a muddled and unconfident exploration of the political theory of individualism under cover of the rhetoric of radicalism.' Allen, FMP, p. 194.
58. To be free in relation to a form of disciplinary power would be at least to be aware of how it works on one, such that one is able at least in principle to alter if not interrupt its working.
59. Michel Foucault, 'The Confession of the Flesh', in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 194-228 (208).
60. The tension between Foucauldian genealogy's dissolution of the individual subject, and Foucault's actual career as an individual, is at the heart of Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of Foucault. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 32-57.
61. Allen, FMP, p. 167.
62. Though I cannot argue in detail for this view here, the role of 'power relations' in the construction of social institutions and the assumptions they rest on strikes me as overemphasized both by Foucault and, especially, his commentators, including Habermas. A power relation, for Foucault, is simply a relation in which some set of persons influences the actions of some other set of persons. Given that definition, the category 'power relations' has no special explanatory power, since every conceivable relation is, trivially, a power relation.
63. Michel Foucault, 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 281-301, p. 284;
64. hereafter cited as ECS.
65. Michel Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 326-48, p. 221; hereafter cited as SP.
66. Michael Kelly, 'Foucault, Habermas, and the Self-Referentiality of Critique', in Michael Kelly, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 365-400 (382).
67. James Johnson, 'Communication, Criticism, and the Postmodern Consensus: an Unfashionable Interpretation of Michel Foucault', Political Theory 25 (1997): 559-83 (572);
68. hereafter cited as CCP. Simon Thompson cites some of the same passages from Discipline and Punish as evidence that '[Foucault's] ethics is concerned with the specification of the conditions of possibility of reciprocal relations between subjects'.
69. Simon Thompson, 'The Agony and the Ecstasy: Foucault, Habermas and the Problem of Recognition', in Ashenden and Owen (eds) Foucault Contra Habermas, pp. 195-211 (199-200).
70. Johnson, CCP, p. 572.
71. Foucault, SP, p. 217.
72. Foucault, ECS, p. 298.
73. See, especially, Foucault, 'Truth and Power', in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 109-33 (131-33).
74. What Habermas is compelled to deny is the implication Foucault sometimes seems to make, that the truth itself, as opposed to an 'economy of truth', is determined by power.
75. This position is in fact held by a number of commentators, including J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 1995),
76. and Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 'What is Maturity?', in David Couzens Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 109-21.
77. Bernstein writes that '[Foucault's] books are meant to be judged as one would judge a work of art rather than raising a validity claim which could be vindicated by the force of better argument and outside the context of its inscription' (p. 166). In Dreyfus and Rabinow's interpretation, '[Foucault] uses language to shift what we see as our social environment'; openly rejecting communicative action and affecting a strategic attitude, Foucault 'positively embraces what Austin would call the perlocutionary effect of language as a means of moving us to concerted action' (p. 115).
78. Habermas, PDM, p. 337.
79. See, for instance, Habermas, TCA-1, p. 329.
80. Foucault, 'The History of Sexuality', in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 183-93 (193);
81. Michel Foucault, 'Interview with Michel Foucault', in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: the New Press, 2000), pp. 239-97 (242);
82. hereafter cited as IMF.
83. ibid., p. 242.
84. ibid., p. 243.
85. ibid., p. 246.
86. ibid., p. 242.
87. Foucault denies experience the status of truth because the experiences he writes out of, and hopes to convey to his readers, are precisely the sort which have no currency in present economies of truth. I would want to say, on Heideggerian grounds, that experience, as our opening to being and being's opening to us, is the most fundamental kind of truth. But the examination of the relationship between this Heideggerian view of truth and Foucault's own (which I take to be an extremely important question, given Foucault's proclamation that Heidegger was always, for him, 'the essential philosopher' [Foucault, ROM, p. 250], and the unorthodox ways in which each of them problematizes the notion of truth) must await another article.
88. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and 'The Discourse on Language', trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 224.
89. See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001).
90. Michel Foucault, 'Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations', in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: the New Press, 1997), pp. 111-20 (112-13).
91. Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: the New Press, 1998), pp. 369-91 (369).
92. Michel Foucault, 'How Much Does it Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth?', in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 348-62 (353).
93. Fillion, FRA, p. 119.
94. One must acknowledge, of course, that participants in political discourse are perhaps normally only on the border of the field of argumentation. But it must also be acknowledged on the other hand that voters in liberal democracies - and, indeed, politicians themselves - frequently change their minds on political matters, and that they want to do so only, and whenever, they find good reasons for doing so. Although there is a strong incentive to dissimulate in democratic politics, there is also a strong incentive - it is actually, in the long run, safer - to have good reasons for one's positions.
95. Nancy Fraser, 'Michel Foucault: a "Young Conservative"?', in Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 35-54 (3).
96. Think of Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment, proposed in support of the thesis that our experiences are not valuable if they are simply given to us, which strikes me as so essential to the libertarianism of Anarchy, State, and Utopia: the appeal of that thought experiment rests solely on a shared ethical sensibility. Plugging in to the machine is simply contrary to the self-conceptions of most modern individuals; no final reason can be given that it is wrong to plug in.
97. Habermas does say that we must not confuse substantive contributions to political debates with philosophy. Habermas, JA, p. 176. I tend to agree with him on this point, but by no means does Foucault ever present his works as purely philosophical ones: rather, they develop certain philosophical insights into the nature of power, knowledge, etc., in relation to their practical, historical significance.