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social development, Habermas contends nevertheless that it is possible
to find "homologous structures of consciousness" in the history of the
individual and of the species. Social evolution is conceived as a
learning process which involves both technical/cognitive and moral!
practical aspects, the stages of which can be described structurally, and
ordered in a developmental logic. To simplify: the human race on the
road to emancipation follows roughly the stages that Piaget and
Kohlberg describe for the individual.
In
assessing Habermas's contribution as a whole, one is forced
to
comment on his extremely involved, turgid, and imprecise style. The
elephantine heaviness of his presentation and the fogginess of his
argumentation owe nothing
to
the great expository tradition of Marx,
or of Heine and Nietzsche. Instead, this author, who puts such store in
the emancipatory potential of language, is given to an academic jargon
cultivated in the German academy which has shielded the arcana of the
professoriat from the intrusive gaze of the vulgar. Habermas writes
about enlightenment in a most unenlightening manner.
As to the substance of his thought, definitive judgments would be
premature. Habermas has stressed that his present writings are only the
first fruits of a much larger intellectual program for the future. Much
of what he has to say seems at present less than persuasive. The
parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny, for example, run counter
to the findings of most specialized scholars in this area. Nevertheless,
what makes Habermas so appealing is his continued attention to the
"big questions " that most academics eschew in their quest for narrow,
but fully documented, results. One can only wish that he might
manage in the future to demolish the formidable linguistic barriers
that he has erected between his discourse and his audience, so that he
can contribute
to
that en lightenment he so ardently wishes to provide.
In
any case, nothing that he writes should go unattended. His is a
significant voice that needs to be listened to, even if it sometimes seems
to speak in riddles.
LEWIS COSER
