The coordination of communicative action

Kísérlet a habermasi társadalomelmélet egy kategóriájának felvázolására

Abstract

The following essay is aimed at answering two questions. The first one concerns the formal character of the critical basis of the Habermasian social theory. Due to the fact that the Habermasian theory already presupposes a democratic institutional background and certain maxims that can not be deduced from the formal pragmatic analysis of language, I argue that its critical basis contains substantive elements. In the second part of the essay I explain one of these elements. This element can be deduced from an immanent problem of the Habermasian social theory. Habermas introduces the notion of communicative action as the coordinating mechanism of social actions. It is needed only if the cooperation gets stuck because of the actors’ different definition of the situation. The communicative action itself is however a social action as well. So the question comes: what mechanism may put it back on track if it gets stuck? With other words: how can the coordination of communicative action be achieved? In default situation the coordination of social actions is assured by the lifeworld, so the problem of coordinating communicative actions is inseparable from the problem of the lifeworld. In The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas differentiates the lifeworlds by their level of rationality/openness. Accordingly, the blocking of communicative action may be traced back to the different rationality levels of the actors; and the coordination of communicative action may be described as the elimination of this difference. So I introduce the coordination of communicative action basically as a process of “reflectivization”. In the course of the elaboration of the notion of “reflectivization” I take into account Habermas’s early and late works as well. Finally using the results of the discourse ethics and the democratic theoretical writings, I conclude that the coordination of communicative action may be described as a relearning of action-coordination on a higher level of moral development.