Faktizität und Geltung marks a major development in Habermas's thinking in a number of respects, not least - of course - in his conception of the status and social function of law itself. In The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas had highlighted a 'parodoxical structure' of the advancing juridification of the social world, whereby the application of legal norms both makes possible the dismantling of inherited, authoritarian power relations, but also produces an effect of 'de-worlding', by disrupting the delicate fabric of lifeworld communication, and the social identities which this sustains¹. In Faktizität und Geltung, however, Habermas reaches the conclusion that this paradox is not inevitable. For he contends that when all citizens, including oppressed and marginalized groups, can participate equally in the shaping of law, bringing forth their own interpretations of their needs, they are able to determine for themselves the appropriate point of equilibrium between a formal and a material intepretation of law. They can strike an appropriate balance between the paternalistic restriction of freedom which social-welfare legislation often brings with it, and the limitation of freedom which results from the application of the same legal rule to materially different cases².

It becomes clear on closer inspection, however, that the dilemma which Habermas describes in Faktizität und Geltung, one which results from the 'ambivalence of the guaranteeing and withdrawal of freedom'³, is no longer precisely the same as that explored in The Theory of Communicative Action. For in the earlier book the negative side of juridification was not revealed merely by the restrictions on individuals' freedom of choice, through regulations such as those governing the workplace, living conditions, or intra-familial relations, or even through the imposition of an objectifying form of control on citizens, who are treated as cases to be legally processed. Rather it also involved a 'disintegration' of those life contexts which are intrinsically dependent on social integration, obliging individuals to take up the depersonalizing and instrumentalizing attitude of juridical subjects towards each other⁴. Furthermore, this disruption was not simply the result of the fact that the juridical re-shaping of ever more social domains is driven by the aim of opening them up to the imperatives of profit and administrative manipulation. Habermas also stressed that the legal medium was simply 'dysfunctional' for 'domains of life which, from a functional viewpoint, are necessarily dependent on a social integration via values, norms, and processes of reaching understanding'⁵.

Of course, Habermas emphasizes throughout Faktizität und Geltung that neither a productive market economy nor an effective public administration are sufficient to hold together a complex modern society: 'The resources which primarily require protective handling are an exhausted natural environment and a social solidarity which is in the process of disintegrating'⁶. However, Habermas will not allow that the continual extension of the legal medium might itself play a role in the aetiology of the second of these problems. It is indeed central to Habermas's perspective on law that the function of law in modern society is to expand, albeit in a controlled and ultimately consensual way, the scope for individual instrumental action. But he maintains that the development of legal regulation must be seen as a response to the erosion of traditional Sittlichkeit, and not as a causal factor in its decay. It is modern societies, and in particular the autonomous dynamic of their economies, which requires an ever increasing number of 'socio-structurally indispensible strategic interactions'⁷, giving rise to the need for a form of regulation of such interactions which can be understood as ultimately grounded in consensus, without depending directly on the solidarity or discursively attained agreement of participants.

However, there is a wide range of evidence which suggests that processes of juridification do indeed weaken a solidaristic sense of responsibility. For example, in an essay on the problems of fostering self-limitation strategies, Claus Offe cites the case of legally-backed pollution controls, which may - counter-productively - encourage the view that everything which is not explicitly forbidden is allowed. Indeed, Offe suggests, individuals and organizations may come to assume a 'right to pollute' below the technically established threshold, or even to include the possibility of legal sanctions itself in the calculation of risks and benefits⁸. In The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas himself cites a range of evidence suggesting that juridical intervention in areas such as welfare, intrafamilial relations and the school system, leads to counterproductive consequences. He argues, for example, that 'The protection of pupils' and parents' rights against educational measures (such as promotion or nonpromotion, examinations and tests, and so forth) or from acts of the school or the department of education that restrict basic rights (disciplinary penalties), is gained at the cost of a judicialization and bureaucratization that penetrates deep into the teaching and learning process. For one thing, responsibility for problems of educational policy and school law overburdens government agencies, just as responsibility for the child's welfare overburdens the wardship courts. For another, the medium of law comes into collision with the form of educational activity. Socialization through the school is fragmented into a mosaic of legally contestable administrative acts'⁹.

One of the reasons why Habermas, just over a decade later, no longer takes this problem so seriously, may perhaps be found in his current conception of the relation between justice and solidarity. In an essay on Lawrence Kohlberg, Habermas has suggested that, because morality is concerned with the vulnerability of individuals, it must also entail a concern for the communities to which they belong, since 'the integrity of individuals cannot be preserved without the integrity of their common lifeworld, which makes possible shared, interpersonal connections and relationships'¹⁰. From this perspective, justice and solidarity are the two coequal dimensions of a post-conventional morality, emerging from the same fundamental form of consciousness. Accordingly, Habermas also suggests that 'every demand for universalization would remain powerless if an awareness of unrenounceable solidarity, the certainty of belonging together in a common life context did not also spring from the consciousness of belonging to an ideal community of communication'¹¹.

This account of the relation between justice and solidarity seems far too harmonistic, however. For it could be argued that, far from springing from 'consciousness of belonging to an ideal community of communication', solidarity, in the form of relations of trust and concern for the well-being of others with whom we belong in a concrete community, is a precondition for such consciousness to have any effective moral reality. There may be situations where even though, as an individual, I can see what course of action would be in the best interests of everyone, I feel justified in not carrying it out because I have no confidence that others will do the same.

In his impressive study Autonomie und Anerkennung, Andreas Wildt has explored this problem in the course of a reconstruction of Hegel's critique of Kant's moral philosophy. The core of Hegel's critique, according to Wildt, is not - as is often supposed - that the validity of moral principles must be relativized in some historicist sense, but rather that there can be situations of 'hopelessly destroyed Sittlichkeit' where it is no longer reasonable to expect individuals to behave morally. In order to accomodate this possibility, Wildt suggests, we need to distinguish between what is morally right and what is practically right. We can then acknowledge that there may be circumstances 'in which it is no longer plausible to adopt a moral standpoint, and thus in which the knowledge that one is morally obliged to do something is no longer a sufficient reason so to act'¹². By contrast, Kant's assumption that moral rightness is unconditional 'categorical' rightness presupposes an over-individualistic concept of autonomy which misleadingly abstracts from the concrete context of motivation¹³.

Interestingly, in Faktizität und Geltung this account of the breakdown of moral motivation is part of Habermas's explanation for the emergence and extension of modern law. He stresses that one of the functions of law is to relieve the excessive burden which modernity places on moral consciousness, and which has three important aspects. Firstly, the complexity of the situations to be morally assessed often overstretches the cognitive powers of the individual; secondly, the organisational resources required to fulfill certain duties are beyond the capacities of the individual; and - most importantly for our purposes - the abstraction of post-conventional morality from concrete forms of life weakens its motivational force, as does the breakdown of expectations that others will follow the same moral norm. But significantly, Habermas does not seem to consider this breakdown of the ethical mediation of morality as in any sense a socially pathological condition. There are, I would suggest, two contradictory reasons for this. On the one hand, Habermas misleadingly equates acceptance by individuals of the 'non-recoverable' (i.e. morally unenforceable) obligations of trust, benevolence and concern with the subsistence of an intact traditional Sittlichkeit¹⁴. From such a perspective, modern moral consciousness will inevitably suffer from an intrinsic lack of motivational force. As Habermas puts it: 'every post-traditional morality requires a distanciation from the self-evidence of unproblematically habitual life-forms. Moral insights which are disconnected from the concrete Sittlichkeit of everyday life no longer automatically have the motivating force which allows judgements to become practically effective'¹⁵. Yet on the other hand, as we have just seen, Habermas also implies that a committment to the common good - presumably in a degree sufficient to sustain the moral authority of law as a form of collective self-regulation, even when law supplants individual moral consciousness - is built into the idealizing play of intersubjective role-taking which he considers essential to the normative infrastructure of communication in general.

If one combines these two - apparently incompatible - assumptions, then the transfer of moral responsibilities to the sphere of legal regulation will appear unproblematic. Habermas speaks of an 'interlacing' of law and morality in modern society: 'This comes about through the fact that in constitutional states the means of positive law are employed to distribute burdens of argument and to institutionalize forms of justification which are open for moral argumentation'¹⁶. Presumably, on this account, the 'solidarity' which is the complement of justice will also be injected into the sphere of law, and indeed, at the beginning of Faktizität und Geltung, Habermas writes of solidarity being 'preserved' in 'legal structures'¹⁷. Yet if the weakness of moral consciousness itself in part derives from a deficiency in forms of collective trust and concern which cannot be legally enforced or required, then the transfer from morality to law will do nothing to address this problem - and indeed, as suggested above, may even aggravate it, perhaps to the extent of triggering a degenerative spiral.

Habermas does stress, throughout Faktizität und Geltung that the good design of procedures for the making and implementation of law in effect only solves half the problem: 'The rational quality of political legislation depends not only on how elected majorities and protected minorities within parliament operate. It also depends on the level of participation and education, on the level of information and the sharpness of articulation of contested issues, in short on the discursive character of the non-institutionalized formation of opinion in the political public sphere'¹⁸. In this sense he shares those anxieties that, in the absence of any vivid public commitment to democratic participation, the Rechtstaat may become an oppressively hollow shell, which - as Charles Taylor has recently reminded us - are least as old as De Tocqueville¹⁹. However, Habermas has little to say, from the standpoint of a philosophically-informed social theory, about kinds of solidarity which would encourage such participation. He prefers instead to put his trust in the spontaneous potential of civil society and social movements to respond to the dangers posed by the autonomous dynamic of social systems²⁰.

This lack of explicit discussion of the problem of solidarity in Faktizität und Geltung becomes more curious when one observes that sensitivity to the 'structural dilemma' which Habermas identified in The Theory of Communicative Action, in the context of his discussion of juridification, has not entirely disappeared from his current work. If anything, this dilemma has been identified at a more general level, in the form of an 'ambiguous process of individualization' which Habermas takes to be characteristic of contemporary society. Formerly, as we have seen, Habermas had tended to assume that modern society generated more or less spontaneously the forms of consciousness which could underpin and motivate a universalistic morality²¹. Now, however, influenced by the work of Ulrich Beck, he acknowledges the negative aspect of individualization, namely the process of 'singularization' in which the individual increasingly becomes an isolated rational decision-making unit, understanding him- or herself objectivistically as consumer, taxpayer, voter, and so on, engaged in interaction with range of social systems²². In the light of this more pessimistic account of the consequences of modernization, Habermas concept of the lifeworld has lost some of its originally protective and defensive colouring. For part of the answer to the problem of singularization, Habermas suggests, is that individuals must learn 'to create socially integrated life-forms themselves'²³. Yet, in his discussions of this issue, Habermas has little to say about the conditions under which such life-forms could be achieved, other than to suggest that individuals must 'recognize each other as autonomous subjects capable of action'²⁴. But although this may be a necessary, it is certainly not a sufficient condition for the creation and sustaining of new, non-regressive but solidaristic forms of life, since it omits any consideration of the need for a common ethical orientation which is implied by Habermas own account of solidarity as grounded in the awareness of sharing a form of life.

II

The theory of recognition developed by Axel Honneth is his recent book The Struggle for Recognition can, in one sense, be seen as an attempt to deal with problems of normativity and identity which Habermas's current emphasis on law leaves unaddressed. Recovering and developing a tripartite schema which he finds both in Hegel and in George Herbert Mead, Honneth argues that it is possible to distinguish three qualitatively distinct forms of recognition which must all be in play if the individual is to acquire the 'external and internal freedom, upon which the process of articulating and realizing individual life-goals without coercion depends'²⁵. The first form of recognition, which Honneth refers to as 'love', is initially experienced in the balance of separation and fusion which characterizes the relationship between the small child and its primary carer. Honneth contends that the fundamental self-confidence which this 'symbiosis refracted by recognition' provides functions as the basis for the development of more complex social relationships: 'this fundamental level of emotional confidence - not only in experience of needs and feelings, but also in their expression - ... constitutes the psychological precondition for the development of all further attitudes of self-respect'²⁶.

By contrast with the affect-laden relation of love, Honneth interprets modern law as involving 'an achievement of purely cognitive understanding' in which individuals are acknowledged as autonomous and morally responsible subjects, a recognition which gives rise to the basic feeling of self-respect²⁷. However, perhaps the most innovative aspect of Honneth's study is to be found in his discussion of the third form of recognition, 'solidarity'. For here Honneth emphasizes that the preconditions for the individual's self-understanding as an autonomous and individuated being, and for the capacity to identify with his or her own aims and wishes, include not just the recognition of all social members as of equal dignity in the eyes of the law, but also an appreciation of the specific concrete contribution of individuals to the general well-being of society: 'persons can feel themselves to be "valuable" only when they know themselves to be recognized for the achievements which they precisely do not share in an undifferentiated manner with others'²⁸. However, 'esteem' in this sense, as the third form of recognition, can only become a reality if there is 'a social medium... able to express the characteristic differences among human subjects in a general - that is, an intersubjectively binding - way. This task of mediation is performed, at the societal level, by a symbolically articulated - yet always open and porous - framework of orientation, in which those ethical values and goals are formulated that, taken together, comprise the cultural self-understanding of a society'²⁹.

The difference between Honneth's perspective and that of Habermas emerges clearly if one considers the latter's discussion of contemporary feminist critiques of welfarist legal intervention in Faktizität und Geltung³⁰. For what is at issue here is not simply whether such intervention restricts the freedom of women, but rather the fact that it treats them as anomalies, and does not reflect an appropriate, non-androcentric valuing of their gender-specific contributions of society. Habermas's solution to this problem is that women, like other groups, should constitute discussion forums within the general space of the public sphere which could articulate their specific feelings, needs and aspirations, and feed them into the formal law-making process. From Honneth's perspective, however, this in itself would be insufficient to compensate for a sense of lack of worth, if not accompanied by a transformation in the values which organize the distribution of social esteem. Furthermore, as is well known, in the case of large discrepancies between legal recognition and social value, the effectiveness of law can be seriously undermined.

Such examples seem to confirm Honneth's advocacy of the need for what he terms a 'post-traditional Sittlichkeit', which would provide individuals with a sense of worth through acknowledgement of their concrete contributions to the general social welfare. However, Honneth does not believe that a philosophically-informed social theory can say anything concrete about the character of such a Sittlichkeit, apart from stipulating that it must integrate all three levels of recognition, and be compatible with modern notions of juridical equality³¹. Yet at this point an important asymmetry between the practical function of the philosophical explication of the 'moral point of view', which Habermas's discourse ethics undertakes, and that of the philosophical definition of the form of a functioning 'post-traditional Sittlichkeit' comes to light. For although, in demonstrating the possibility of the moral point of view, one can defuse moral scepticism, and to this extent produce a practical effect without advocating any specific moral perspective, it is not possible in the same way to encourage a general social commitment to fostering solidarity, merely by providing a philosophical analysis of Sittlichkeit. For no-one wonders whether social solidarity is possible - merely what expressions of it, if any, are desirable. In concluding The Struggle for Recognition Honneth suggests that a future 'post-traditional solidarity' could be organized around a variety of value schemes, from 'political republicanism' or an 'ecologically based asceticism' to a 'collective existentialism'. But, in tune with a certain Marxist tradition of scepticism about moral desiderata, he hands over the future predominance of one of these schemes to the outcome of social struggles³².

Yet even if Honneth has succeeded in demonstrating that human integrity and well-being presuppose a society and culture which incorporate his three forms of recognition, his agnosticism may well be self-defeating if it requires the philosopher simply to stand back and observe while a variety of socio-ethical conceptions clash with one another intellectually and politically. To be effective, such a demonstration must surely also be accompanied by other forms of philosophical exploration and argument, intended to discover how well - and to what extent - fundamental human concerns and aspirations are articulated by various value schemes, and whether such schemes, or elements of them, can be combined or reconciled with others, which foreground different dimensions of human existence.

This point naturally raises the question of why Honneth strives to restrict his description of Sittlichkeit to a 'formal' level. The obvious answer is that he wishes to avoid the imputation that culturally specific values and assumptions have implicitly shaped his general account of the good (social) life, thereby vitiating its universality. But this answer raises two separate sets of difficulties. On the one hand, it seems very unlikely that the material which Honneth uses to substantiate his argument - for example studies of child development drawn from the object-relations tradition in psychoanalysis - has not itself been shaped by culturally specific presuppositions. Honneth tries to avoid this problem by stressing the empirical dimension of the enquiries he draws on - indeed, he describes his method, in a somewhat puzzling phrase, as an 'empirically controlled phenomenology'³³. But this description surely begs the question. For as the history of the social sciences, with its range of competing paradigms, amply demonstrates, the fact that the accounts of recognition on which Honneth relies can find empirical support does nothing to overcome their potential relativity. In this sense, even the supposedly 'formal' concept of Sittlichkeit which Honneth wants to provide runs a high risk of resting of material presuppositions, and therefore being ab initio non-neutral between competing conceptions of the good (social) life.

On the other hand, even if one accepts, as seems only fair, that Honneth's account of the 'good life' achieves a high level of generality, albeit not pure formality, the range of contents which it can accomodate is still severely restricted by the key-concepts around which it is organized. Honneth's three forms of recognition are described as preconditions of autonomy and self-realization, or what Honneth calls the 'unforced articulation and realisation of individual lifegoals'. Yet one can easily imagine other positions, even within the spectrum of contemporary ethics, such as those of Charles Taylor or Emmanuel Lévinas, in which the subordination of individual life-goals to the 'the Other who dominates me in his transcendence', in Lévinas's phrase, or the choosing of goals which respond to the claims which an ultimate, divine source of goodness makes upon me, claims which may thwart my personal aspirations, might be considered more important than self-realization understood in terms of individual fulfillment³⁴.

Thus, once the deceptive methodological patina is stripped away, it becomes clear that Honneth's work takes a specific ethical perspective on human subjects and their integrity and well-being, and argues this through by drawing both on philosophical reflection and empirical forms of enquiry. This is not to say that the resulting conception is arbitrary, of course - merely that its formality can only be a matter of degree. Accordingly, there seems to be no reason of principle why the claims could not be made even more specific, in the course of an attempt to assess and render compatible insights drawn from a variety of ethical and political traditions and orientations. Naturally, social-scientific, psychoanalytic, and other forms of evidence would play a major role in such explorations - there could be no question of a purely philosophical 'deduction' of a picture of the good life. Nevertheless, the question of the ethical texture of the society which we inhabit, and should aspire to inhabit, could then once more become an explicit object of philosophical reflection, in a way which has fallen into disrepute in the Critical Theory tradition ever since Adorno's Minima Moralia. The counter-argument that the answer to such a question will always be historically relative does not seem to me to be decisive. For one can fully admit this relativity, while nevertheless insisting that it cannot be total, and that the answer should therefore be informed by an awareness of the constant, fundamental features of human existence.

III

It is interesting to note, in this context, that Habermas does not deprive philosophy any capacity whatsoever to engage with questions of the structure and integrity of forms of life. On the contrary, his current metaphilosophy distinguishes emphatically between two fundamental functions of philosophy, which he describes as those of 'stand-in' and 'interpreter'. As stand-in, philosophy holds open the space for, and acts as a collaborator with, reconstructive theories in the human sciences, which spell out the implicit knowledge mobilized by certain very general human competencies, and thereby helps to provide the underpinning for universalistic theories of morality and law. In its interpretive function, however, philosophy explores, and may help to correct, the reifications which ensue from the excessive predominance of one rationality complex within the life-world, and helps to bring the cognitive and moral resources developed within the institutionally specialized rationality spheres back into its domain - the only place where they can be put democratically to work³⁵. According to Habermas, philosophy, in this interpretive role, is a culturally specific activity - it can only help to illuminate a determinate lifeworld, a particular totality of background assumptions, but cannot offer an account of the totality of the world as a whole, the 'object' of traditional metaphysics. As a consequence, philosophy in its role as interpreter is also debarred from producing qualitative rankings of different cultural totalities.

However, a paradox seems to result from this philosophical division of labour between reconstructive and interpretive tasks. On the one hand, Habermas attributes the cognitive progress of modernity to the differentiation of the three value spheres of 'truth', 'rightness' and 'authenticity'. It is only when cognitive claims, for example, can be filtered out from the symbolic and ethical contexts in which they were formerly embedded, and thematized with the aid of specific, institutionalized forms of enquiry, that the epistemic take-off of modern science becomes possible. Similarly, modern moral universalism implies the existence of a sphere within which questions of justice can be treated by legal and other experts who are skilled in isolating normative issues. At the same time, however, Habermas stresses that - within the life-world - the three dimensions of validity continue to be intrinsically interwoven. Yet, if this is the case, a question arises concerning which 'ontology' should be taken to be more fundamental. As Martin Seel has expressed the issue: does the lifeworld exhibit an illusory integration of rationality dimensions, which is exposed as such by their modern institutional separation, or is it rather the integration of the lifeworld which reveals the illusory separation of rationality dimensions characteristic of specialized cultures of expertise?³⁶. To put this in another way: the problem with Habermas's conception is that natural-scientific knowledge - to take this example - is universal in its scope, but can only be produced through a process of cognitive abstraction on the part of subjects who remain existentially embedded in the lifeworld. Such knowledge therefore remains epistemically derivative in relation to this context. On the other hand, the life-world, which appears as existentially more fundamental in terms of its formal fusion of validity claims, will always appear as particular and relative in terms of the content which these validity-claims articulate.

Habermas, in his reply to Seel, appears not to appreciate the force of this objection. He states that each specialized form of argumentation can indeed, under the pressure of problems encountered, be abandoned in favour of another form, and that judgement will play an important role in deciding if and how this takes place. In this way a coherence and interdependence of the forms of argumentation is acknowledged, while at the same time allowing Habermas to claim that 'every discourse stands, so to speak, directly before God'³⁷. Habermas goes on to suggest that this is not surprising, since 'communicative action encounters in the different types of argumentation only its own reflected forms'. But this reply omits to consider that the types of argumentation also have ontological implications: that discourse within the cognitive-instrumental rationality complex, for example, implies a world of normatively neutral facts, while discourse in the legal-moral sphere, as Habermas conceives it, presupposes the existence of a source of normativity which is logically independent of any specific states of affairs. This splitting of ontological domains is incompatible with the fusion of truth, rightness, and aesthetic appeal which characterizes our experience of, and ways of assessing, the everyday human world which we inhabit. So the question arises: which ontology is more fundamental? Are the fusions of fact and value typical of the life-world projections which veil an essentially value-neutral reality or not?.

In itself, this may appear to be a relatively minor problem for Habermas's position. But it takes on greater importance as soon as one tries to locate philosophy on one side or the other of the divide between the lifeworld and the specialized spheres. In its role of placeholder, philosophy is located unambiguously by Habermas within the institutions of systematic research. But he also stresses that philosophy would betray its age-old inheritance if it were to understand itself merely as one specialized discipline amongst others. In the form of interpretation, philosophy is both closely allied - and radically opposed - to everyday understanding. It moves within - and is related to - the non-objectifiable totality of a lifeworld, in a manner similar to that of common sense, yet at the same time its critical and reflective stance opposes it to everything which is taken for granted³⁸. We already know that philosophy, in its function as stand-in, is expected to meet the same fallibilistic criteria of truth as any other specialized science. But now the difficulty arises that these expectations will require philosophy to satisfy a standard which is itself abstracted from the lifeworld whose integrity philosophical interpretation seeks to explore and sustain.

Habermas himself appears to sense this problem when he remarks that 'this mediating task [of interpretation] is not devoid of a certain paradox, because in the expert cultures knowledge is always treated under individual aspects of validity, whereas in everyday practice all functions of language and aspects of validity encroach on each other, constitute a syndrome'³⁹. Although Habermas does not say so directly, the task of mediation appears 'paradoxical' because the philosophical language which translates specialized validity claims back into the terms of the lifeworld must itself fuse the various dimensions of validity, and in this case will not be susceptible to any straightforward assessment of its 'cognitive' truth. According to Habermas's own account, the philosophical task of interpretation embodies 'the interest of the lifeworld in the totality of functions and structures which are bundled and joined together in communicative action. However it sustains this relation to the totality with a degree of reflexivity which is lacking in the background of the lifeworld, which is only intutively present'⁴⁰. But there is no obvious reason why the introduction of reflexivity as such need disrupt the interfusion of validity dimensions which this account implies - there are, after all, forms of reflexivity other than the cognitive, such as those which we find in works of art.

Yet despite his awareness of this paradox, Habermas, in some of his recent writings, seeks to maintain that philosophy must now satisfy the specialized criteria of cognitive truth. Against the historical background of the institutionalized separation of validity spheres, he argues that: 'Today, philosophy could establish its own distinct criteria of validity - in the name of genealogy, of recollection (Andenken), of elucidating Existenz, of philosophical faith, of deconstruction, etc. - only at the price of falling short of a level of differentiation and justification that has already been reached, i.e. at the price of surrendering its own credibility (Glaubwürdigkeit)'⁴¹. Curiously, it does not occur to Habermas to consider the types of philosophical activity which he lists here as primarily concerned not to evade a specialized treatment of truth-claims, but rather to perform the interpretive task which he immediately goes on to describe as 'an enlightening promotion of lifeworld processes of achieving self-understanding, processes that are related to totality', and which is necessary because 'the lifeworld must be defended against extreme alienation at the hands of the objectivating, the moralizing, and the aestheticizing interventions of expert cultures'⁴². This dismissal of the major modalities of contemporary philosophy becomes even more surprising when one recalls that Habermas himself has stressed the necessarily 'multilingual' character of philosophy in its role of interpretive mediator between science, art and the lifeworld⁴³. For what can these multiple languages be, if not precisely the genealogical, hermeneutic, phenomenological and deconstructive currents of twentieth-century philosophy? What other discourses are available which weave between validity-dimensions, reflecting upon the textures of the lifeworld as a whole, and thus simultaneously confirming and disrupting them? To suggest that such discourses are not 'credible' (glaubwürdig) seems a clumsy accusation at best, since they clearly do not aspire to provide 'knowledge' in the modern, specialized sense. This is not to suggest, of course, that they need be simply taken at face value⁴⁴.

It would seem that the difficulties in which Habermas finds himself here arise from fact that, on the one hand, he wishes to restrict the status of the claims of philosophy to the validity sphere of cognitive truth. Partly in consequence of this, he then restricts the scope of the claims of philosophy as interpretation to specific lifeworlds, since it does not appear that the evaluative claims of philosophy could aspire to the strict, trans-cultural universality typical of successful truth-claims. Indeed, Habermas currently limits the role of philosophy as interpreter primarily to the task of explicating life-world intuitions, and defending the force of these intuitions against the invasive movement of technology and science. This already represents a certain defiant reversal of direction in the traffic between the lifeworld and the differentiated spheres of expertise, compared with Habermas's former account of interpretation as the translation of specialized insights into the de-differentiated context of an 'impoverished' lifeworld⁴⁵. Nevertheless, it still remains implausible in its attempt to constrain the universalistic aspirations of philosophical discourse.

IV

I would now like to retrace the argument so far. We have found that, in Faktizität und Geltung, Habermas downplays the possibilities for conflict between law and solidarity, arguing rather that law can be understood as a remote but nonetheless still identifiable distillate of solidarity. Habermas does indeed acknowledge that a sense of collective belonging is a necessary though endangered resource in contemporary society, but he proposes no philosophically informed analysis of this situation. By contrast, Axel Honneth's recent work, particularly The Struggle for Recognition, develops a theory of solidarity as a third essential dimension of recognition, alongside love and law. But Honneth seeks - not entirely convincingly - to limit himself to a formal account of the good life, and to avoid assessing the relative merits of different structures of value, and of social projects which entail different distributions of social esteem. In this respect Habermas's notion of philosophy as 'interpreter', although underdeveloped, could be seen as filling a lacuna in Honneth's work. Habermas himself, of course, insists that philosophy in its interpretive role is always bound to the horizons of particular traditions, and cannot make claims, even by negation, about the good life in general. Yet, as we have seen, this attempt to restrain the scope of philosophy leads to inconsistencies.

Fundamentally, what is at stake here is the sense in which Habermas's theory can still be regarded as emancipatory - as expressing a viewpoint which is 'anchored extratheoretically in an empirical interest or moral experience', as Axel Honneth puts it⁴⁶, and in this sense as continuing the tradition of Critical Theory. Habermas himself is clear that an emancipatory process involves the conjunction of moral and ethical reflection: 'If in posing "ethical" questions we would like to get clear about who we are and who we would like to be; and if in posing "moral" questions we would like to know what is equally good for all; then an emancipatory transformation of consciousness combines moral insight with a new ethical self-understanding. We recognize who we are because we have also learned to see ourselves differently in relation to others'⁴⁷. Yet while he affirms that philosophy, by reconstructing the normative presuppositions of communication in general, can provide a justification of morality and democracy, Habermas sees no role for philosophy in ethical discourses, the responsibility for which must - he insists - be left to the participants in discussion themselves.

However, this restriction seems to be dictated by Habermas's assumption that the contribution of philosophy to ethical discussion could only consist in the imperious handing down of a priori insights. He affirms, for example: 'I do not at all correspond to the traditional image of the "philosopher", who explains the world from a single point'⁴⁸. Such a perspective fails to recognize that we can be forced into a philosophical investigation of our deep tacit assumptions and presuppositions precisely by ethical tension and conflict. An outstanding recent example of such investigation would be Charles Taylor's critical analysis of the internal contradictions of our modern 'ethics of authenticity'⁴⁹. Habermas might reply, of course, that there is no reason to describe such investigations as 'philosophical' rather than reflectively 'ethical', but such a reply would in turn highlight the difficulties of his attempt to restrain the claims of evaluative discourses within the confines of specific traditions.

In his general account of 'evaluative' discourse in The Theory of Communicative Action, where he takes aesthetic critique as his main exemplar, Habermas suggests that the claim raised by such discourse is the relative one of the 'appropriateness of standards'⁵⁰: 'Above all', Habermas argues, 'the type of validity-claims with which cultural values appear do not transcend local bounds in the same way as claims to truth or rightness. Cultural values do not count as universal... Values can only be made plausible in the context of a specific life-form. For this reason, the critique of value-standards presupposes a common pre-understanding of those who participate in argumentation, which is not at their disposal, but which simultaneously constitutes and limits the domain of the thematized validity-claims'⁵¹. As an account of 'aesthetic critique', this description must already be considered tendentious, since such critique undoubedly strives for universality, even while being aware that this is far harder to achieve than in the case of cognitive claims. Furthermore, in cases where the aesthetic standards at the basis of the discussion are themselves problematized by the fact of disagreement, the specifically philosophical issue of the appropriateness of these standards, assessed in the light of what is essential to a work of art as such, cannot help but be raised. Aesthetic critique, and indeed therapeutic critique in many of its modes, and a fortiori philosophical interpretation of the ethical sphere, cannot help but address the question of the relation between our culturally embedded standards and values and the ultimate or true nature of the relevant phenomena.

This point could be made in another way by pointing out that Habermas lacks (and indeed must lack, given his current assumptions) a 'philosophy of culture'. Despite the centrality of the concept of tradition to his account of interpretation, and indeed to his theory of 'ethical discourse', Habermas gives no account of what culture itself might be, as a fundamental human phenomenon, other than an ultimately contingent constellation of assumptions and values which varies from one society to another. Yet there exists an powerful tradition of thought, prominently represented in Germany, which has plausibly claimed that the varied forms of human culture can be viewed as a repertoire of responses to certain fundamental dilemmas of human existence and self-awareness⁵². This is the perspective of what Merleau-Ponty termed 'vertical history'⁵³ - as opposed to the horizontal relativity of cultures. Consideration of this dimension might have allowed Habermas to break through the rather shallow linguisticality of his conception of the life-world, and to accept that no genuine self-exploration of a culture can ultimately avoid confronting the basic questions of human existence as such.

Of course, it is always easy and tempting to sceptical about the possibility of transcending our cultural and linguistic confines, in the manner currently exemplified by Richard Rorty, who nonchalantly claims that 'we have no prelinguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate, no deep sense of how things are which it is the duty of philosophers to spell out in language'⁵⁴. However, such a position overlooks the fact that the linguistically-disclosed lifeworld is not simply a world, but also the world: there is no neutral space in which it could be situated as one self-enclosed world amongst others, since the only neutrality on offer, that of naturalism or physicalism, cannot accomodate lifeworlds conceptually at all. Thus the assumptions and values which structure the lifeworld are not projections onto the screen on an independent reality, but rather perspectival ways of experiencing the world as such. Implicitly Habermas recognizes this, since he is highly critical of Rorty's celebration of a supposedly final victory of metaphors of self-creation over metaphors of discovery, insisting that frames of world-disclosure shift in reponse to the resistance of what they disclose⁵⁵. Yet by describing the task of interpretation as a rendering explicit of the intuitions of a particular lifeworld, Habermas fails to acknowledge that philosophical thought, in its interpretive dimension, cannot help but weave back and forth in the field of tension between a cuturally-sedimented interpretation of the world, and the experience of the world tout court⁵⁶. Without this depth dimension, Critical Theory would begin to lose its emancipatory point. The vibrant ethical and political culture which Habermas regards as necessary to complement and sustain the formal structures of the Rechtsstaat must surely include - albeit as a modest component - philosophical explorations and assessments of our fundamental values and existential orientations. Interpretation without reconstruction may be morally blind; but reconstruction without interpretation is surely empty. Furthermore, interpretation cannot be merely an elucidation of the internal structure of a lifeworld. It must appraise the claims and assumptions made by our culture in the light of a conception of human existence and its place in the world as such, since such claims and assumptions are bound to be multiple and conflictual, and cannot be evaluated simply by appealing to traditions which are themselves susceptible to multiple interpretations.

The reluctance of Critical Theory to take on this task will not result in ethical discourses and struggles for recognition untainted by the uncomfortably absolutist claims philosophy, as Habermas often seems to imagine. The current influence of a certain philosophical tradition, running from Nietzsche to Foucault and Derrida, in providing the vocabulary for the politics of identity and difference, the pervasiveness of its terminology as the medium of articulation for the self-understanding of oppressed and marginalized groups, suggests that, if Critical Theory abandons the field, then other philosophical resources will inevitably be drawn upon. Such resources often lack the commitment to a thoroughgoing reflexive elucidation of their own genesis in historical experience which is characteristic of the Critical Theory tradition. They can often be insensitive their own pre-theoretical roots in contemporary social developments, and for this reason may generate categories whose inappropriateness can harbour moral and political confusions - perhaps even dangers. Thus a conjoining of the defence a democratic understanding of law, as one of the essential frameworks for emancipation, with the articulation of a philosophical self-understanding which could play a role in fostering new forms of social solidarity, and thus help to impede the overextension of law, should not be discouraged out of an exaggerated fear of succumbing to metaphysical foundationalism. For different, though related, reasons both Honneth and Habermas consider themselves to have moved unequivocally onto a 'post-metaphysical' terrain. But, as Herbert Schnädelbach has pertinently enquired: 'Does not the post-metaphysical age truly begin when, inundated by the media and other tranquillizers, we simply no longer ask certain questions?'⁵⁷.

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