Page 207 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

184 Communication and Evolution of Society

ethics, higher religions, and philosophies, which go back to the
great founders: Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, the prophets of
Israel, and Jesus.’* These rationalized world views had the form
of dogmatizable knowledge. Arguments took the place of narra-
tives. There were to be sure ultimate grounds, unifying principles,
which explained the world as a whole (the natural and human
world). The ontological tradition of thought was also on this
level. Finally, in modern times, especially since the rise of modern
science, we learned to distinguish more strictly between theoretical
and practical argumentation. The status of ultimate grounds be-
came problematic. Classical natural law was reconstructed; the
new theories of natural law that legitimated the emerging modern
state claimed to be valid independently of cosmologies, religions,
or ontologies.
With Rousseau and Kant this development led to the con-
clusion that the formal principle of reason replaced material
principles like Nature or God in practical questions, questions
concerning the justification of norms and actions. Here justifica-
tions are not based only on arguments—that was also the case
in the framework of philosophically formed world views. Since
ultimate grounds can no longer be made plausible, the formal
conditions of justification themselves obtain legitimating force.
The procedures and presuppositions of rational agreement them-
selves become principles. In contract theories, from Hobbes and
Locke to John Rawls,’® the fiction of a state of nature or of an
original position also has the meaning of specifying the condi-
tions under which an agreement will express the common interest
of all involved—and to this extent can count as rational. In tran-
scendentally oriented theories, from Kant to Karl-Otto Apel,’®
these conditions, as universal and unavoidable presuppositions of
rational will-formation, are transposed either into the subject as
such or into the ideal communication community. In both tradi-
tions, it is the formal conditions of possible consensus formation,
rather than ultimate grounds, which possess legitimating force.
Thus, by levels of justzfication | mean formal conditions for
the acceptability of grounds or reasons, conditions that lend to
legitimations their efficacy, their power to produce consensus and
shape motives. These levels can be ordered hierarchically. The