Page 8 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

ix Translator’s Introduction

was the replacement of a direct access to practice with a purely
technological understanding of the theory-practice relationship;
the principal gain was the introduction of scientific rigor into the
study of society. Accordingly, the outstanding task for a post-
positivist methodology of social inquiry was somehow to com-
bine philosophical and practical moments with the methodological
rigor, which was ‘‘the irreversible achievement of modern sci-
ence.” * Of course, the type of practical philosophy Habermas
himself had in mind was not the classical Greek but.that which
developed in the movement of German thought from Kant
through Marx; and the type of combination he envisaged was
summed up in the phrase: “empirical philosophy of history with
a practical (political) intent.”
The presence of the term philosophy in this characterization of
critical theory did not signal a basic disagreement with Marx's
dictum that the demands and results of philosophy could be
preserved only through “the negation of previous philosophy, of
philosophy as philosophy.” Habermas was not using the term
in its traditional sense as a presuppositionless mode of thought
that provided its own foundations. With Marx he regarded
philosophy as belonging to the world on which it reflected and
as having to return to it; the ideals inherent in philosophy—truth
and reason, freedom and justice—could not be realized by thought
itself. The philosophy of history, in particular, was marred by a
failure to realize this. Pretending to a contemplative view of the
whole of history, prospective as well as retrospective, it claimed
to reveal its meaning, often in terms of a necessary progress
toward some metaphysically guaranteed goal ascribed to God or
Nature, Reason or Spirit.
As Habermas interpreted him, the young Marx rejected this
construction. For him the movement of history was not at all a
matter of metaphysical necessity; it was contingent in regard to
both the empirical conditions of change and the practical en-
gagement of social agents. The meaning of history, its goal, was
not a subject for metaphysical hypostatization but for practical
projection; it was a meaning that men, in the knowledge of ob-
jective conditions, could seek to give it with will and conscious-
ness. The exaggerated epistemic claims of the traditional philos-