Page 200 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

177 Historical Materialism

(a) that we know how social evolution can be measured, and
(b) that we regard social evolution as good. Waddington starts
from the idea that these presuppositions have been adequately
clarified within biology because (a) the directional criterion of
natural evolution is supposed to hold for social evolution as well,
and (b) with the reproduction of life, health is posited as an
objective value. Even if (a) were unproblematic, there is in (b)
a naturalistic fallacy: the biologist is in no way forced to adopt
as his own preference the observed tendency to self-maintenance
inherent in organic life—unless it be through the fact that he is
himself a living being. But in the objectivating attitude of the
knowing subject he can ignore this fact.
The situation is somewhat different in the case of the normative
foundation of linguistic communication, upon which, as theoreti-
cians, we must always (already) rely. In adopting a theoretical
attitude, in engaging in discourse—or for that matter in any com-
municative action whatsoever—we have always (already) made,
at least implicitly, certain presuppositions, under which alone
consensus is possible: the presupposition, for instance, that true
propositions are preferable to false ones, and that right (i.e.,
justifiable) norms are preferable to wrong ones. For a living
being that maintains itself in the structures of ordinary language
communication, the validity basis of speech has the binding force
of universal and unavoidable—in this sense transcendental—
presuppositions.®® The theoretician does not have the same pos-
sibility of choice in relation to the validity claims immanent in
speech as he does in relation to the basic biological value of
health. Otherwise he would have to deny the very presuppositions
without which the theory of evolution would be meaningless. If
we ate not free then to reject or to accept the validity claims
bound up with the cognitive potential of the human species, it is
senseless to want to ‘‘decide”’ for or against reason, for or against
the expansion of the potential of reasoned action.®° For these
reasons I do not regard the choice of the historical-materialist
criterion of progress as arbitrary. The development of productive
forces, in conjunction with the maturity of the forms of social
integration, means progress of learning ability in both dimen-
sions: progress in objectivating knowledge and in moral-practical
insight.