Page 19 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

XX Translator’s Introduction

cluding analytic ego psychology) .'” The task, as he sees it, is to
work out a unified framework in which the different dimensions
of human development are not only analytically distinguished
but in which their interconnections are also systematically taken
into account. Beyond this, the empirical mechanisms and boundary
conditions of development have to be specified. This is clearly
an immense task, and Habermas is still in the process of working
out an adequate research program. The general (and tentative)
outlines of his approach are nevertheless clear. He adopts a
competence-development approach to the foundations of social
action theory; the basic task here is the rational reconstruction
of universal, “species-wide,’’ competences and the demonstration
that each of them is acquired in an irreversible series of distinct
and increasingly complex stages that can be hierarchically ordered
in a developmental logic. The dimensions in which he pursues
this task correspond to the universal-pragmatic classification of
validity claims, that is, to the four basic dimensions in which
communication can succeed or fail: comprehensibility, truth,
rightness, and truthfulness. Each of these specifies not only an
aspect of rationality, but a “region” of reality—language, external
nature, society, internal nature—in relation to which the subject
can become increasingly autonomous. Thus ontogenesis may be
construed as an interdependent process of linguistic, cognitive,
interactive, and ego (or self-) development.
Only the first three of these can be regarded as particular lines
of development; the ontogenesis of the ego is not a development
separable from the others but a process that runs complementary
to them: the ego develops in and through the integration of “in-
ternal nature” into the structures of language, thought, and ac-
tion. Of course, the acquisition of universal competences represents
only one, the structural, side of identity formation; the other side
is affect and motive formation. Unless the subject is able to in-
terpret his needs adequately in these structures, development may
be pathologically deformed. Thus a general theory of ego devel-
opment would have to integrate an account of the interdependent
development of cognitive, linguistic, and interactive development
with an account of affective and motivational development.
The second essay translated for this volume, ‘‘Moral Develop-