Page 11 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

xil Translator’s Introduction

rests on an unwarranted sublimation of social processes entirely
into subjectively intended and/or culturally transmitted mean-
ings. If, however, these meanings are viewed in relation to the
social, political, and economic conditions of life, it becomes evi-
dent that they can conceal and distort as well as reveal and express
these conditions. Thus an adequate social methodology would
have to integrate interpretive understanding with critique of
ideology. Of course, this requires a system of reference that goes
beyond subjective intentions and cultural tradition, one that sys-
tematically takes into account the objective framework of social
action and the empirical conditions under which traditions his-
torically change. Developments in the economic and _ political
spheres, for example, can overturn accepted patterns of interpre-
tation. And such developments are not as a rule simply the results
of new ways of looking at things; rather they themselves bring
about a restructuring of world views. Thus an adequate social
methodology would have to integrate interpretive understanding
and critique of ideology with an historically oriented analysis of
social systems.
To specify desiderata in this way is obviously only a first step
on the way to a fully developed critical social theory. In both
Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften and Knowledge and Human
Interests Habermas did go on to offer a number of suggestions
on the direction in which further steps might lead. In the latter
work, he used Freudian psychoanalysis as a “tangible example’’
of critical theory in order to derive from its analysis a number of
general methodological clues.® Interpreting Freud’s work as a
theory of systematically distorted communication, he pointed out
the ways in which it went beyond a purely verstehenden explica-
tion of meaning. In contrast to normal hermeneutics, psycho-
analytic interpretation deals with ‘‘texts’’ that both express and
conceal their “‘author’s’”’ self-deceptions. The ‘‘depth hermeneu-
tics” that Freud developed to deal with this “internal foreign
territory” relies on theoretical assumptions that are only partly
explicit in his own work. Their full and consistent development
would require a general theory of normal (undistorted) com-
munication, a developmental account of the acquisition of the
competence to communicate, as well as an account of the condi-