Page 120 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

97 The Development of Normative Structures

time, bourgeois consciousness has become cynical; as the social
sciences—especially legal positivism, neoclassical economics, and
recent political theory-—show, it has been thoroughly emptied of
binding normative contents. However, if (as becomes even more
apparent in times of recession) the bourgeois ideals have gone
into retirement, there are no norms and values to which an im-
manent critique might appeal with [the expectation of] agree-
ment. On the other hand, the melodies of ethical socialism have
been played through without result. A philosophical ethics not
restricted to metaethical statements is possible today only if we
can reconstruct general presuppositions of communication and
procedures for justifying norms and values.®
In practical discourse we thematize one of the validity claims
that underlie speech as its valzdity bas7s. In action oriented to
reaching understanding, validity claims are ‘always already’ im-
plicitly raised. These universal claims (to the comprehensibility
of the symbolic expression, the truth of the propositional content,
the truthfulness of the intentional expression, and the rightness
of the speech act with respect to existing norms and values) are
set in the general structures of possible communication. In these
validity claims communication theory can locate a gentle but
obstinate, a never silent although seldom redeemed claim to
reason, a claim that must be recognized de facto whenever and
wherever there is to be consensual action.’ If this is idealism,
then idealism belongs in a most natural way to the conditions
of reproduction of a species that must preserve its life through
labor and interaction, that is, also by virtue of propositions that
can be true and norms that are in need of justification.®
c. Not only are there connections between the theory of com-
municative action and the foundations of historical materialism;
in examining individual assumptions of evolutionary theory, we
run up against problems that make communications-theoretical
reflections necessary. Whereas Marx localized the learning pro-
cesses important for evolution in the dimension of objectivating
thought—of technical and organizational knowledge, of instru-
mental and strategic action, in short, of productive forces—there
are good reasons meanwhile for assuming that learning processes
also take place in the dimension of moral insight, practical knowl-