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CRITICAL POLITICAL THEORY AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT

On Kohlberg, Hampden-Turner, and Habermas

HERBERT G. REID and ERNEST J. YANARELLA

Despite the eclipse of the New Left as an active and visible political force on the American political scene during the transition from the 1960s to the '70s, the concern with subjectivity, self-development, and personal awareness has remained a conspicuous feature of the undertow of mainstream society. Indeed, the period during which radical activity was virtually extinguished on American campuses was simultaneously marked, not simply by the continuing presence of the human growth and human potential movement, but by its efflorescence and expansion. In part, the growth of this "fetish of subjectivity" can be accounted for by the continuing operation of the "dialectic of scientism and subjectivism" in American culture. But it must also be traced to the failure of the American New Left to, on the one hand, keep itself from being caught in this dialectic and, on the other, to politicize and redirect the deeper foundations of this search for a new selfhood, x Thus, even as much of the "remnant" remains skeptical of the radical potential of the new subjectivity (seeing in it the familiar tendencies in American political culture toward inner escapism and subjectivism), it must maintain an openness toward the possibility, as Marcuse has recently suggested, 2 that even in its present distorted forms the new subjectivity may take on new expressions and unfold new needs which cannot be satisfied within the liberal-capitalist and increasingly technocratic-corporate totality of contemporary America. 1

While the more apparent and sensational forms of the new subjectivism associated with the counterculture (hard drugs, esoteric religions, biofeedback, etc.) have been exhaustively examined and critiqued, a new and disguised form of the new subjectivism infecting middle-class society has gone virtually unnoticed: the developing preoccupation with ethics and morality in

Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky

506 politics and economics. Over the past decade or so, one expression of this concern has been the interest in emergent theories of moral development. Drawing heavily upon the work and inspiration of the French child psychologist Jean Piaget, American psychologists like Lawrence Kohlberg and others have sought to explore the character and structure of moral reasoning in Western and non-Western cultures. 3 Contemporary political events - s u c h as the moral bankruptcy of the United States' Vietnam adventure and the failure of key policy makers to choose the options of "exit" and "voice" in responding to that bankruptcy, the discovery of the moral obtuseness of the arguments of the conspirators in the Watergate scandal, and the recent revelations of payoffs to foreign leaders by American-based corporations have added impetus to this public concern with the moral condition of liberal America. In an almost thoroughly reified society, a reform movement based on an ethical renewal of liberal principles and procedures is hardly surprising. What Luk~ics said for Bernstein's effort to reform socialism applies equally well to this latest campaign to reform American capitalism and its liberal politics. This ethical reformation, Lukgcs argued, "is the subjective side of the missing category of totality which can alone provide an overall view." In a reified world, "action is directed wholly i n w a r d . . . [and] the attempt [is made] to change the world at its only remaining free point, namely man himself (ethics)."4 This essay in critical political theory argues a critical phenomenology of moral development, one which simultaneously (1) reformulates the notion of moral development outside the Kantian tradition of ethics and autonomous rationality and beyond the Lockean-liberal framework of American political thought, and (2) draws the sources of this reformulation from the lifeworld foundations of the embodied ego intentionally grounded in a socio-historical praxis oriented toward the rationality of dialectical sociality. The critique of the works of Lawrence Kohlberg on moral development and Charles Hampden-Turner on psycho-social development has been inspired by a depth reconstruction of the perspectives offered by the Frankfurt School and the native critique of American political culture and society (including the Berkeley School, Hartz, et al.). Habermas' formulation of the relationship between moral development and ego-identity is explored and criticized from the perspectives of the founders of the Frankfurt Institute and the views of latter-day critical phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty, Rovatti, and Paci). Finally, we hope to outline the key sources and main lines of a more adequate critical phenomenological outlook on moral development resting on post-modern foundations.

507

Kohlberg's Scheme of Moral Development With the possible exception of Erik Erikson's theory of ego development and his work on psychohistory, perhaps no contemporary theory of psychological development has received as much attention and critical scrutiny from psychologists, educators, and philosophers as the theory of moral development produced by Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg and his associates. The reasons for its attractiveness to such a wide circle of academics are not difficult to discern. In the nearly twenty years since Kohlberg first laid the groundwork for his six-stage schema of moral development, his work has generated a body of research of cross-cultural scope which has simultaneously challenged the behavioristic mainstream in American psychology (from Wundt to Skinner) and developed the major pedagogical implications of a non-behavioristic theory of development in the areas of moral education, sex education, and criminal justice, s Working from the cognitive developmental framework on moralization developed by Piaget, Kohlberg has discerned from empirical research three distinct levels of moral reasoning and, within those three levels, six discrete stages of moral development. (See figure 1.) In positing the existence of this tri-lateral, six-stage schema, Kohlberg and his associates have devised and utilized a series of short studies couched in the form of moral dilemmas which are presented to their subjects for moral interpretation. Since the studies are literally structured as dilemmas (i.e., no solution is available which does not involve negative costs), the interviewees are given the opportunity to reveal the cognitive complexity and moral sophistication of their reasoning under situations of ambiguity and conflict. The subject's stage of moral development is determined by the interviewer on the basis of his responses. Several noteworthy points in this research.need to be underscored. First, in regard to the methodology itself, it is the form of moral reasoning, not the content of the arguments used, which is the basic datum of the Kohlbergian psychologist. Theoretically, two subjects may reach diametrically opposed conclusions concerning a particular moral dilemma and yet be situated in the same stage of moral development by virtue of the parallel modes of moral reasoning employed. For Kohlberg, the uncoupling of the form of moral reasoning from its content and the focus on the former assures the psychologist of the scientific (i.e., non-ideological) and structural status of his research enterprise. 6 Regarding the findings of Kohlberg's research, several of the most significant bear mention. Perhaps his most provocative conclusion derived from limited cross-cultural data representing twelve cultures is that the six

508 Figure 1 .' Kohlberg's Stages o f Moral Development I. PRE-CONVENTIONAL LEVEL At this level the child is responsive to cultural rules and labels of good and bad, right or wrong, but interprets these labels in terms of either the physical or the hedonistic consequences of action (punishment, reward, exchange of favors) or in terms of the physical power of those who enunciate the rules and labels. The level is divided into the following two stages: Stage 1: The punishment and obedience orientation. The physical consequences of action determine its goodness or badness regardless of the human meaning or value of these consequences. Avoidance of punishment and unquestioning deference to power are valued in their own right, not in terms of respect for an underlying moral order supported by punishment and authority (the latter being Stage 4). Stage 2: The instrumental relativist orientation. Right action consists of that which instrumentally satisfies one's own needs and occasionally the needs of others. Human relations are viewed in terms like those of the marketplace. Elements of fairness, of reciprocity, and of equal sharing are present, but they are always interpreted in a physical pragmatic way. Reciprocity is a matter of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours," not of loyalty, gratitude, or justice. II. CONVENTIONAL LEVEL At this level, maintaining the expectations of the individual's family, group, or nation is perceived as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences. The attitude is not only one of conformity to personal expectations and social order, but of loyalty to it, of actively maintaining, supporting, and justifying the order and of identifying with the persons or group involved in it. At this level, there are the following two stages: Stage 3: The interpersonal concordance or "'good boy - nice girl.t'' orientation. Good behavior is that which pleases or helps others and is approved by them. There is much conformity to stereotypical images of what is majority or "natural" behavior. Behavior is frequently judged by intention - "he means well" becomes important for the first time. One earns approval by being "nice." Stage 4: The "law and order" orientation. There is orientation toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of the social order. Right behavior consists of doing one's duty, showing respect for authority, and maintaining the given social order for its own sake. III. POST-CONVENTIONAL, AUTONOMOUS, OR PRINCIPLED LEVEL At this level, there is a clear effort to define moral values and principles which have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups or persons holding these principles and apart from the individual's own identification with these groups. This level again has two stages: Stage 5: The social-contract, legalistic orientation. Generally with utilitarian overtones. Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and in terms of standards which have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society. There is a clear awareness of the relativism of personal values and opinions and a corresponding emphasis upon procedural rules for reaching consensus. Aside from what is constitutionally and democratically agreed upon, the right is a matter of personal "values" and "opinion." The result is an emphasis upon the "legal point of view," but with an emphasis upon the possibility of changing law in terms of rational considerations of social utility (rather than freezing it in terms of Stage 4 "law and order"). Outside the legal realm, free agreement and contract are the binding elements of obligation. This is

509 the "official" morality of the American government and Constitution. Stage 6: The universal ethical principle orientation. Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency. These principles are abstract and ethical (the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative); they are not concrete moral rules like the Ten Commandments. At heart, these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of the human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons. Source: Kohlberg, "The Moral Atmosphere of the School," in N. Overley, ed., The Unstudied Curriculum (Washington, D.C., 1970), pp. 124-125.

stages of moral development (uncovered in American research) have been cross-culturally validated and may now be deemed to form a universal, invariant sequence. As he has baldly put it, "all individuals in all cultures go through the same order or sequences of gross stages of development, though varying in rate and terminal point of development .,,7 In addition, according to Kohlberg, the idea of a universal, invariant sequence implies - and empirical studies supposedly confirm - that: (1)based on longitudinal studies of the moral development of selected individuals, a person moves from one stage to the next higher stage - no skipping of stages occurs; (2) human beings, at whatever stage, appear capable of understanding the moral reasoning of others only one stage beyond their own present stage; (3) with the exception of some stage 4 subjects who temporarily regress to stage 2 reasoning on their way to stage 5 thinking, moral development is irreversible, i.e., once a stage of moral development is achieved, regression to lower stages does not take place; and (4) "cultural teaching and experience can speed up or slow down development, but cannot change its order or sequence. ''~

Kohlberg's Stages and the Ideological Hegemony of Lockean-Liberalism From the critical theoretical and phenomenological perspectives grounding critical political theory, a number of criticisms may be lodged against the explicit conceptual structure and tacit ideological underpinnings of Kohlberg's work, as well as against the pedagogical inadequacies of this corpus of psychological research. 9 In so doing, this critique helps to retotalize and recontextualize the socio-economic critique of Piaget-Kohlberg presented by Susan Buck-Morss 1~ and the cultural critique of Kohlberg offered by Elizabeth Simpson) 1 We argue that Kohlberg's writings on moral development may be best interpreted as a manifestation of the growing exhaustion of Lockean-liberalism as a moral force in the United States and as an effort

510 within the crumbling ideological edifice of liberalism to renew itself by appealing to (and rather uncritically appropriating) the most sophisticated philosophical and ethical extension of that tradition - Kantianism. As a description of the existential conditions of the United States and as a normative vision for American society, Lockean-liberalism has been accorded a privileged place in our history. As Hartz, the Berkeley School, Reid, and others have shown, owing to circumstances unique to the founding of America as a fragment society, this ideology took root in the American terrain, embedded itself in virtually every recess of our social existence, and in dialectical symbiosis with our capitalist economy - achieved an unexcelled and almost unchallengeable authority and status. 12 Because it so thoroughly permeated American political culture and society, its ideological character was submerged in the American psyche and its limits were lost to our national political consciousness. As late as the 1960s, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., could still speak with reverence of the American genius as residing in its commitment to discrete, unconnected, and time-tested ideas rather than to an "ideology. ''13 But as early as 1955, the opaqueness of the ideological hegemony of Lockean-liberalism was beginning to yield to critical scrutiny. C. Wright Mills wrote of the fate of liberal values in a period of economic malaise and political drift, in a modern world whose overriding realities no longer reflected those values. 14 In addition, for a brief period in the early '60s, the New Left lifted the ideological veil of Lockean-liberal hegemony by attributing the domestic upheaval and international calamity to the failure of liberalism.IS By 1971, Walter Dean Burnham could state without exaggeration that there was a crisis of American political legitimacy and that it was truly a crisis of liberalismfl 6 Thus, what is striking about the growing popularity of Kohlberg's work on moral development is that it is occurring precisely at a time when the foundations of American liberalism are eroding in nearly all of the central institutional matrices of American society. The central norms and sanctions of liberalism sedimented into those institutions are no longer holding and a frantic search for a new form of legitimacy is taking place. But Kohlberg's psychologistic approach to moral development blinds him to the full import of all of this desperate flailing about by Americans for new means of bringing order and stability to the chaos of our public and private lives. Yet Kohlberg's schema of moral development rests upon the tacit foundations of this historically-evolved and historically-changing ideology, and owes its broad appeal to the strenuous efforts of public administrators, liberal academics, and intellectuals to fortify and rejuvenate the sagging ideological bases of p~blic authority through the strategy of ethical reform.

511 In his recent defense of a hermeneutic approach to social inquiry, Charles Taylor criticized mainstream political science for regarding liberal-capitalist society not as one structure of intersubjective meaning among many other possible ways of socially constructing reality, but rather as the "inescapable background of social action as such. ''17 In our view, Kohlberg and his associates are vulnerable to precisely the same ideology critique. That is, Kohlberg has taken the dominant intersubjective symbols and meanings of liberal-capitalist America as the inescapable background of moral development as such. As Taylor notes, In this guise it no longer need be an object of study. Rather it retreats to the middle distance, where its general outline takes the role of universal framework, within which (it is hoped) actions and structures will be brute data identifiable, and this for any society at any time. 18 Seen in this way, Kohlberg's stages of moral development take on a very different character. In the first place, it seems evident that his purported hierarchical stages mask the highly ideological nature of the entire sequence of stages. Those stages may be interpreted as residing wholly on a single ideological continuum within I_ockean-liberalism. Kohlberg's latent liberal loyalties, to be sure, do not express themselves in the vocabulary of classical liberalism. Indeed, his interpretation of the universal ethical orientation of his sixth stage as based upon the "universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of the human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons" would seem to mark his thought as standing outside the bounds of the liberal paradigm. Yet this paradigm is hardly exhausted by its classical articulation, since as a living cultural force which has existed in symbiotic relationship to capitalist institutions, it has remained historically changing, albeit within limits. However, the deeper core values of this historically-evolving ideology have remained constant. It is here that the reform liberalism of Kohlberg anff even some of his most subtle critics (like Kenneth Keniston) remains fixed. In the second place, this ideology critique reveals the apparent ease with which Kohlberg and others can proclaim their schema of moral development a universal, invariant sequence applicable to all cultures. As Simpson and others have observed, the cross-cultural data on which this claim is based have been selectively released and in any case remain much too limited to justify such a sweeping conclusion. 19 In addition, others have suggested that Kohlberg and his fellow researchers have shown a tendency to interpret their data in a rather perfunctory and self-serving manner) ~ Finally, apparently some of

512 the cross-cultural studies allow the researchers to do little more than conclude that in some non-Western cultures representatives of the upper stages (5 and 6) do not exist at all. 21 If we are correct in assuming that a significant amount of support for the purported sequential structure and universal scope of Kohlberg's moral developmental schema springs from the covert role played by the dominant values (and their multiple forms) of Western liberalism as mediated by the American context, these and other observations are hardly puzzling. By forgetting the historically-specific and socially-constructed nature of these values and symbols as they have been institutionalized in our "civilization of work," Kohlberg can forge the "content" of these "forms" of moral reasoning into a hidden universal framework informing the interpretation of the interview data from national and cross-cultural inquiries. Kohlberg and Kantianism: Perspectives from Critical Theory and Phenomenology In his effort to revitalize the psychological study of moral development and wrest it from the grip of Skinnerian behaviorism, Lawrence Kohlberg sought inspiration in the work of Jean PiagetY In the process of assimilating Piaget's studies in moral judgment, Kohlberg also incorporated - indeed, at deeper levels, embraced more completely - the Kantian underpinnings of the noted French/Swiss psychologist's cognitive developmental approach. That Piaget draws significantly upon the Kantian tradition seems difficult to deny. For he opposes both crude empiricism (what he calls "geneticism without structure") and pure rationalism (what he calls "structuralism without genesis"). The point was nicely put by D.W. Hamlyn when he stated that "just as Kant's reconciliation between empiricism and rationalism came through the idea that experience is determined by categories which are a function of the mind, so Piaget's reconciliation of empiricism and nativism comes through the idea that experience develops according to structures which are, likewise, a function of the mind in its relationship to the world. ''2a Kohlberg embraces Piaget's Kantian reconciliation in the form of the relational (Piaget) or interaction (Kohlberg) method and understands the cognitive stages of moral development in terms of genetic structuralism. He further weds himself to a Kantian outlook by characterizing moral principles as categorical imperatives. With this mutual appropriation of Piagetian method and Kantian philosophical and ethical baggage come features which compound native Lockean ideological proclivities in Kohlberg's work and add new Kantian epistemological liabilities to his developing research - proclivities and liabilities greatly illuminated by Western Marxism's critique of Kantian ethics and overt forrealism, and phenomenology's critique of idealism.

513 As the highest expression of bourgeois liberalism, Kant's thought was a natural object of critical and penetrating scrutiny by critical Marxists from Luk~tcs to the Frankfurt School. Because of his Kantian presuppositions, Kohlberg's theoretical edifice features many of the same shortcomings disclosed by these critical theorists. Kohlberg seems most vulnerable to the charge of formalism in radically divorcing form from content in his theory of moral development. Recall that his claim to the universal sequential ordering of his stages of moral development is based upon a structured patterning of the forms of moral reasoning discerned in his and his associates' longitudinal and cross-cultural empirical studies. In the course of his analysis of the "antinomies of bourgeois thought" (with which Kantian philosophy was riddled - essence/appearance, science/ethics, external determinism/inward freedom, etc.), Lukgcs offered a historical-genetic analysis of abstract formalism which saw this particular kind of abstraction, with its emphasis upon the primacy of form over content and the abstract over the concrete, as a product of the industrial stage of Western capitalism .24 Taking as his central guidepost Marx's insight into the way that the commodity structure generates the exchange principle, reification, and fetishism, Luk~cs demonstrated how, as Susan Buck-Morss has indicated, Kant's formalism which attributed cognitive value to the abstract structure of verbal judgments and the rational forms of time, space, and causality, regardless of particular, concrete content, paralleled the capitalist concern for abstract exchange value rather than social use v a l u e . . . [how] Kantian dualism, the separation of formal mental.operations from the perceptual objects which provided the content of thought, was the cognitive counterpart to the alienation of workers from the object of their production. 2s Far from being a universal and timeless form of perceptual receptiveness to the world, this form of cognition was itself social content of an historicallyevolved socio-economic totality. Kohlberg's cognitive stages qua abstract formal structures may be subject to a similar critique. Buck-Morss advances her case against Kohlberg's developmental schema by arguing that "what he does not consider is whether form itself is content, whether the very notion that morality can divorce form from content, far from 'culturally universal' or 'natural,' manifests the structure of a specific society at a specific stage of economic development. ''26 Our only amendment to Buck-Morss' criticism is that, in the case of Kohlberg's model, the forms of moral reasoning comprising this sequential model are filled at deeper, more submerged levels with the Lockean-liberal values historically sedimented as the hegemonic ideology of the American social totality.

514 It is part of the academic conceit of Kohlberg's writings that, on the basis of such scant and apparently unreliable studies, the stages of moral development are imputed to all cultures, while those "primitive" cultures and lower socio-economic classes which fail to manifest the highest stages (social contract and principled autonomy) are said to have a "retarded" moral development. 27 Certainly, with respect to the former, Maccoby and Modiano seem better cultural anthropologists when they offer a contradictory interpretation of the scope of abstraction and its relative merits in their recent study. In a cross-cultural and urban-rural study of American and Mexican children's abilities to determine abstract equivalences among different objects, they conclude, If the peasant child is not dulled by village life, he will experience the uniqueness of events, objects, and people. But as the city child grows older, he may end by exchanging a spontaneous, less alienated relationship to the world for a more sophisticated outlook which concentrates on using, exchanging or cataloguing. What industrialized, urban man gains in an increased ability to formulate, to reason, and to code the ever more numerous bits of complex information he acquires, he may lose in a decreased sensitivity to people and events. 28 Even in Mexico, abstract formalism of the kind so endemic to the Western industrial world has not taken root in significant parts of this "developing" nation. The relationship of Mexican peasant children to other people and to nature is far more concrete, intimate, and cooperative than is the norm in advanced industrial societies. The Frankfurt School took their critique of the logic of abstract formalism in Kantian thought one step further than Luk~cs, and their criticisms have even more chilling (and unexpected) implications for a depth-hermeneutic critique of Kohlberg's approach. In their excursus on Kant, de Sade, and Nietzsche, significantly entitled, "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality," Horkheimer and Adorno situate Kant's ethical formalism within the dialectic of enlightenment and domination - one of their most important contributions to our understanding of the deep roots of technological rationality in modern thought and action. 29 The major thrust of their extremely subtle, dialectical analysis is succinctly summarized by Martin Jay: Once again, Horkheimer and Adorno stressed the continuity between bourgeois liberalism, in this case symbolized by Kant, and totalitarianism, here prefigured by de Sade and, to some extent, Nietzsche. Kant's effort

515 to ground ethics solely in practical rationality, they argued, was ultimately a failure. The Enlightenment's treatment of nature, and by extension of men, as objects was fundamentally in accord with the extreme formalism of the categorical imperative, despite Kant's injunction to consider men as ends rather than means. Carried to its logical extreme, calculating, instrumental, formal rationality led to the horrors of twentieth-century barbarism. 3~ Their essay on enlightenment and morality attempts to show that Kant is the architect of the Enlightenment's model of maturity, of its systematic moralism. Furthermore, they contend that in a peculiar dialectical inversion, the enlightenment aspirations of Kant's ethical system turned into their opposite and indeed that it is the "work of the Marquis de Sade" which "portrays" Kant's ideal of "understanding without the guidance of another person" which they translate as "the bourgeois individual freed from tutelage .,,31 They write: Kant's principle that "everything is to be done on the basis of the maxim of one's will as one which, while legislating universally, can act with itself as an object" is also the secret of the superman. His will is no less despotic than the categorical imperative. Both principles aim at independence from external powers, at the unconditioned maturity defined as the essence of enlightenment. 32 These remarks are especially pertinent to Kohlberg's stage 6 and to the strange and complex relationship between stage 6 and stage 2 reasoning which he and his compatriots have uncovered in some subjects. The depth-historical interpretation of Kant's ethics by Horkheimer and Adorno suggests that the highest stage on Kohlberg's scale - which, with its characteristic emphasis on moral principle, private conscience, and personal autonomy, bares its Kantian garb - has not really transcended the pre-conventional stage of instrumental rationality but at its deepest levels continues to exist in dialectical tension with it and, as we shall argue, indeed may be founded upon it. Some of Kohlberg's and his associates' own research findings tend to support this philosophical interpretation. One of the most peculiar series of findings on moral development uncovered by the Kohlberg school has to do with the cases of moral development in which the subjects at the upper reaches of the scale undergo a regression to stage 2 moral reasoning. A number of longitudinal studies have noted that some subjects - particularly during the period of late adolescence or the stage of y o u t h - temporarily

516 regress to stage 2 from stages 4 or 5. 33 After this moratorium in moral growth, most return to the earlier stage or surpass it by moving to the next stage. This phenomenon has been labeled the "Raskolnikoff Syndrome" by Kohlberg to suggest that this "regression in the service of the ego" may occur among those moving toward post-conventional morality as a means of liberating the individual of guilt and anxiety and of providing him/her with a mental space for thinking through and integrating the implications of the next higher stage into his/her personal orientation. ~ In addition, other studies of radicals at Berkeley and Boston have found that most of them were in the post-conventional stage 6 and premoral stage 2. as Apparently the stage 2 radicals do not really have the capacity to reason in a principled manner but can only mimic the statements and actions of their stage 6 compatriots, reverting to highly instrumentalist and opportunistic modes of behavior "when push comes to shove." What complicates any hard-and-fast distinction between stage 2 radicals and their stage 6 counterparts is that both can comprehend higher levels of moral judgment and often respond to political controversy in highly moralistic styles of argument 36 To the degree that these findings strike us as puzzling and hint at something significant about moral judgment, they call for a hermeneutic excavation of their meaning carried out in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty's aphorism that every significant behavioral fact anticipates a phenomenological insight. 37 Reintegrating our perspectives on the Lockean and Kantian dimension in Kohlberg's work, we explore, through depth-historical analysis and contemporary examples, the manner in which technological rationality became the characteristic method of American political thought. We also describe how the New Left in the sixties became ensnared in this familiar American orientation and mode of action - particularly expressed in its culturally-specific dialectic of pragmatism (instrumentalism) and moralism so characteristic of a submerged Lockean-liberal ideology.aS What a critical hermeneutics of American political culture and society suggests for the analysis of moral judgment, is, first, that given the socio-cultural depth of technological rationality in the United States, an instrumentalist mode of reasoning and behavior is an all "too obvious" structure for Americans no matter what their individual capacities for moral reasoning and, secondly, while none of Kohlberg's research supports it, the experience of fascism in Germany and Italy makes it an open question whether massive regression in what Kohlberg calls moral reasoning but what we would prefer to call psycho-political development - could take place in the United States.

517 This counter-interpretation points up the significance of Kenneth Keniston's critical assessment of Kohlberg in the context of his subtle reflections on the relationship between moral development and sociopolitical activism. 39 In the course of his critique of the "perils of principle," Keniston takes note of the paradoxical nature of the appeal to abstract personal principles by individuals (especially political actors). Some of those identified with such moral reasoning clearly fall into the category of great political philosophers and cultural synthesizers like Socrates, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King (Keniston's examples), while others who adopted a similar type of formal moral reasoning evidently fall into the category of moral zealot, bigot, or dogmatist like the "best and the brightest," members of the Nazi Youth Movement, and the Weatherman faction of the New Left (our examples). Keniston resolves this apparent paradox by arguing with psychoanalysis against modern developmental psychologists like Kohlberg who de-couple the moral dimension from human development in its totality. He calls this analytic and arbitrary, and says that, "Following Anna Freud's thinking suggests that whether the highest stages of moral reasoning lead to destructive zealotry or real ethicality depends upon the extent to which moral development is matched by development in other sectors. ''4~ And, among the most critical of these related sectors of development, he pinpoints those involving compassion, the capacity for love, interpersonal mutuality, and empathy as essential for humanizing the highest levels of moral reasoning. In a passage reminiscent of Michael Polanyi's and Albert Camus' parallel definitions of nihilism, Keniston notes how "the history of revolutions that have failed through the very ardor of their search for moral purity suggests that the combination of abstract personal principles with a humorless and loveless asceticism is especially likely to be dangerous.''4~ Critical theory and phenomenology contribute to a deepening and refounding of Anna Freud's important insight and its critical appropriation by Keniston. The key figures in the Frankfurt School were keenly aware of the intimate relationship between psycho-sexual development and moral development. With their profound concern over the transformation which their homeland underwent from the birth of the Weimar Republic to the ascendancy of Hitler, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse as well as Erich Fromm strove to understand the deep historical and psychic roots of Nazism. Many of their works display their interest in uncovering the latent psycho-sexual dynamics of moral and political development and regression. 42

518 The principal achievements of critical phenomenology from Marx to MerleauPonty and beyond have been to radicalize our understanding of human development. Leading critical phenomenologists have sought to repair the split and dualisms into which the analytic knife of modern psychology has carved the world (cognitive/affective, subject/object, higher needs/lower needs) by recovering the lifeworld foundations of human development residing in the universal structures like embodiment and sociality which exist beneath and before the analytic alienation of these living processes. Keniston's concern with restoring the embodied and social nature of human development is amply reflected in Merleau-Ponty's work, including his critique of the cognitive developmental approach of Jean Piaget. Summarizing a major thrust of Merleau-Ponty's criticism of Piaget, John O'Neill states: The cognitive approaches to child development overlook the tacit subjectivity which does not constitute its world a priori nor entirely a posteriori but develops through a "living cohesion" in which the embodied self experiences itself while belonging to this world, and others, clinging to them for its content. 43 This approach shows how these universal structures of embodiment and sociality have been masked by the sedimentation of Lockean-liberal assumptions which, in common sense, social science, and philosophy, stress the mind/body dualism and a particularly virulent form of possessive individualism. Developmental psychology is only beginning to transcend the hegemony of these beliefs and orientations. Kohlberg's work illustrates how a body of theory and research critical of mainstream psychology remains so caught in its deeper current that it largely recapitulates its major philosophica! assumptions and ideological outlook. Despite his clever attempts to circumvent the atomistic bases of his "ethical liberalism," Kohlberg's hierarchical schema - including stage 6 - rests squarely in the tradition of autonomous rationality. As David Rasmussen has stressed, the revolutionary, though ambiguous and incomplete, achievement of Kant lay in his grappling with and offering an epistemological resolution to the problematic of subjectivity or human identity - specifically, his concept of the mind as the active agency in constructing the world. According to Rasmussen, Whereas the notion of subjectivity was unavailable to traditional societies, the Kantian man is one who freely constructs his own reality in such a way that he can be said to be the maker of his own destiny. The focus, of

519 course, is internal, upon the achievements of the inner self, or, in terms of Kantian ethics, the focus is upon duty. The Kantian man is on a voyage of internal liberation of the self - his problem is to become what he will begin to recognize as his essential self. 44 One fundamental difficulty in this way of addressing or rendering the problematic of subjectivity, says Rasmussen, is that this model of autonomous rationality or autonomous man obscures the social and institutional context of human subjectivity by situating the problem of identity in a purely internal context. In contrast, he goes on to argue, an alternative model of dialectical sociality - derived from the tradition of Hegel and Marx radically redefines the problem of individuality and self-identity in terms of a practical struggle to overcome the predefined identity imposed upon individuals by the socio-cultural totality, by reconstituting the social conditions and cultural context in which they exist in order to realize their true social nature. 4s Thus, the human self, individuality, autonomy, identity, must be conceived in thoroughly social and institutional terms even though particular institutional arrangements and supporting ideologies may suppress or conceal that inherent sociality. Implicit in this discussion of alternative models of rationality is that the problem of moral development must be refounded upon a model of dialectical sociality and that it must be reconceptualized as an eminently political problem. Kohlberg is evidently uncomfortable with the ideal of the autonomous self and with tl~e modernized imagery of possessive individualism. Thus, in defining his stage 6 (the universal ethical principle orientation), he characterizes those "self-chosen ethical principles" as abstract "universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons. ''46 In addition, his latent dissatisfaction with this ideal is manifested in his recent involvement with experiments in forging "just communities" as a means of fostering moral development. When he tries to ground these abstract principles theoretically, however, he turns to Rawls' theory of justice - perhaps the most ambitious contemporary effort to resuscitate and rejuvenate liberal social contract theory. 47 Considering that the image of human nature guiding Rawls' political theorizing is a conception of man as basically a self-interested creature possessing a limited sense of benevolence, it is clear that in Kohlberg, no less than in Rawls, the autonomous model is not really transcended. The autonomous foundations of his ideal of moral development and the political naivete of his general approach lead Kohlberg to frame the peda-

520 gogical consequences of his research in cognitivist and reform-liberal terms. His cognitive developmental approach to moral education has stressed the need to integrate discussions of moral or civic dilemmas into courses on social studies, sex education, and other topics in order to enhance students' cognitive capacities for ethical reasoning. The emphasis in such practices is on form rather than content, and the rationale for this strategy is to avoid moral indoctrination .48 From a critical phenomenological perspective, this pedagogical approach does not begin to engage the political educative tasks dictated by the depthhermeneutic analysis of American political culture, especially the impact of American constitutionalism upon American political consciousness. Political theorists like Jacobson, Baskin, and Pranger disclose what Kohlberg's research in its own indirect way supports, namely, the retarded level of psychopolitical development in the United States, a situation promoted by the permeation and institutionalization of Lockean-liberal ideology (and other convergent strains in early modern culture) in American culture and society.49 Seen in this way, the problem of moral education vs. moral indoctrination in the implementation of Kohlberg's cognitive developmental approach is a sham issue. Rather, given the depth and the extent of the problems of political myth and false consciousness stemming from Lockean-liberal hegemony in the United States, what is clearly called for is a genuine strategy of political education interpreted as a form of critical hermeneutics of the body politic - a critical hermeneutics involving both a demystifying and a restorative element, s~ We have tried to perform these essential tasks of political education with regard to Kohlberg's theory of moral development. The negative critique, however, risks becoming merely a demystifying hermeneutics. In part, this emphasis was grounded in the concern that the social engineering of moral development may become a central tendency of public policy in American secondary and perhaps even college education. The sense of moral decay is keenly felt by liberal academics, public policy-makers, and politicians these days and, according to a recent Gallup poll, fully three-quarters of the American populace believe that morals and moral behavior should be taught as part of the course curricula of public schools, sl Let us now turn our attention to the writings of Charles Hampden-Turner and Jfirgen Habermas in order to gain some appreciation for the ambiguity of their contribution to the project of a critical hermeneutics of the body politic.

521 Figure 2: Hampden-Turner' s Model o f Psycho-Social Developm en t

(1) Man EXISTS freely (2) through the quality of his PERCEPTION (3) the strength of his IDENTITY (10) Each will attempt to (4) and the synthesis of ORDER the FEEDthese into his anticiBACK from this procpated and experiess into mental enced COMPETENCE. matrices of develop4, hug COMPLEXITY. (5) He COMMITS this with intensity and authen(9) and through a diatieity in his human lectic achieve a environment higher SYNERGY. ,~ ~" (6) by periodically SUS(8) He seeks to make a PENDING his cogniSELF-CONFIRMING, tire structures and SELF-TRANSCENDRISKING himself ING IMPACT upon the other(s) ~r (7) in trying to BRIDGE the DISTANCE to the other(s)

j,

Source. Hampden-Turner, RadicalMan (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), p. 37.

Hampden-Turner, "Radical Man," and a Model of Psycho-Social Development: The Possibilities and Limits of Existential Radicalism The early writings of Charles Hampden-Turner on psycho-social development - particularly his R a d i c a l M a n - may be seen as an advance over the categorical foundations of Kohlberg's work on moral development.S2 Despite the existentialist bases o f his thought, Hampden-Turner struggles in R a d i c a l M a n to construct an ideal-typic model of psycho-social development. His

model of the process of psycho-social development o f "radical m a n " is schematized in figure 2. Hampden-Turner makes a number of points by which he attempts to move the model beyond the confines of autonomous rationality and methodological individualism. He highlights its field theoretical nature, noting that "the model foreshadows a field theory and not a monadic one" such that "each segment derives its meaning from its place in the total field. ''s3 This implies for him the holistic nature of his model o f development and leads him to emphasize how an obsessive preoccupation with one or a few segments of the

522 cycle at the expense of other segments not only causes the others to deteriorate, but in addition causes "atrophying segments [to] also pull down the very segment with which the actor is obsessively concerned. ''s4 Thus, for example, the deleterious consequences apparent in American education of extreme concern with the development of cognitive capacities can be viewed as supporting the need for a holistic approach to human development. Moreover, Hampden-Turner's model points to what he calls synergistic relationships with others as a requisite for genuine psycho-social development. "The individual can only grow," he argues, "in relationship to 'significant others' with whom he forms synergistic relationships. ''ss By synergy he intends the interpersonal "fusion between human aims and resources to create m o r e between the acting parties than they had prior to the interaction. ''s6 Synergy then implies both (1) the fusion of competences (say cognitive and affective) at the individual level such that a qualitatively higher synthesis of skills emerges and (2)the fusion from the social interaction of individuals or social groups such that the new partnership or higher identity achieved produces more than the sum of the parts, s7 A final noteworthy feature of Hampden-Turner's model involves the recovery of the affective dimensions of psycho-social development and their integration into a holistic conception of human development which does not establish a hierarchy of levels or dimensions that depreciates the affective for the cognitive. Though couched in existential language, his analysis of the quality of perception and the openness to the realm of needs (for us, the pre-categorical), as well as his stress on the periodic suspension of one's cognitive structures and the personal investment of meaning into social reality, manifest a sensitivity to the need to transcend the tyranny of the categorical.s8 These positive steps are only haltingly advanced by Hampden-Turner in his early work, and in the end he accepts Kohlberg's categorical foundations and schema of moral development. From a critical phenomenological standpoint, perhaps the most serious shortcomings are his subjectivistic conception of the self and his objectivistic understanding of the social system and technology. It is apparent that the existentialist and modernist foundations of his model of psycho-social development cannot adequately ground his fleeting recognition of the sociality of humanity and the pre-categorical bases of human needs, desires, and feelings. Lacking firm roots in a comprehension of the Lebenswelt, he can only fall back upon the idea of the autonomous self grounded in the existential strain of the tradition of autonomous rationality from Kierkegaard to the early Sartre. Hampden-Turner's "radical man" is the lonely Promethean creator, gazing upon absurdity, acting authentically, seeking

523 self-disclosure and self-fulfillment, s9 That his existential man finds it necessary to fashion his identity in relation to others, to risk himself in trying to bridge the distance to others and to form synergistic relationships with others is laudable. Yet neither the sources of the impulse to sociality in radical man nor the latent and universal structure of sociality in human existence are ever really grounded in the intersubjective, multi-leveled lifeworld which we all inhabit in common as social beings. Not only does Hampden-Turner's subjectivistic understanding of self fail to provide the social strivings of radical man with a foundation, but also his subjectivistic epistemology masks an objectivistic ontology. Hampden-Turner, it is true, begins his first book with a blistering indictment of scientism in modern social science. As one of the present authors has argued, to pose the "question" as one of "self or system," as some essays toward "humanistic politics" are now doing, is to remain on intellectual terrain prepared by the technological world-view and to miss the radical philosophical and political significance of post-modern themes such as "dialectics" and "life-world." No fully adequate critique of objectivism in human science is possible from a subjectivistic "humanist" standpoint. 6~ One reason for this incapacity is that subjectivists - whether humanistic psychologists (Hampden-Turner), cultural critics (Reich), or literary gurus (Roszak) - invariably end up by conceding too much to the objectivistic and scientistic self-image of science. So it is not surprising that Hampden-Turner should seek confirmation of his model of psycho-social development in an indiscriminate welter of "'objective" social science studies. More to the point, however, is Hampden-Turner's capitulation to t h e reified image of the "system." Rather than seeing reification as a social process and the product of reification as constituted by "soCial relations mediated by things," Hampden-Turner suppresses the human, social, and ideological bases of reified social institutions and the dialectically mediated relationships between "self" and "system." Social institutions become "abstract formal systems" which serve either as constraints ("safety harnesses") or as technological or economic instruments for pursuing human goals and values. 61 Given this objectivistic ontology, he can state without contradiction that "freedom does not reside in an abstract system, but in the human personality. "62 In contrast, without losing sight of the reifying processes in techno-corporate society, critical phenomenology dialectically understands social institutions both as the source of our unfreedom and as the potential source of concrete, situated social freedom. The implications of this point for illuminating other

524 inadequacies of Hampden-Turner's approach are many, but in the present context, one especially germane question might be addressed to HampdenTurner: how can a model purporting to encompass a theory of psycho-social development be truly "synergistic" or dialectical without incorporating the social or institutional moment of human development? Finally, from the perspective of critical phenomenology, this loss of the social leads Hampden-Turner to overrate the developmental potential of T-groups as well as to overvalue the corporation-designed experiments in worker selfmanagement. 63 Another consequence of this loss is Hampden-Turner's growing preoccupation with Kohlberg's scheme of moral development and his substitution of moralism for critical dialectical theory. Owing to the absence of any grasp of the involvement of the social totality in human development and to the loss of the lifeworld foundations of sociality, the locus of change for reformist political thinking - as Lukgcs commented - comes to reside in the individual and the agency of change is reduced to moral exhortation. 64 These proclivities were already apparent in his early writings and have been magnified over the years. For example, in Radical Man Hampden-Turner alleged the virtual isomorphism of his model and Kohlberg's. 6s More recently, he has all but identified Kohlberg's stage 6 as the paradigm of radical man, and has gone on to situate the various social sciences within the six-stage sequence of moral development - predictably seeing humanistic psychology at the apex. 66 Thus the tasks of political education as a form of praxis are disabled, leaving the individual and humanistic psychology to shoulder more weight and responsibilities than either can possibly bear.

Habermas and Beyond: From "System and Life-World" to Life-World and Praxis Here we attempt to assess JiJrgen Habermas' theory, or more precisely its conceptual intersections with Kohlberg and, to some degree, HampdenTurner, in light of the most relevant perspectives of the early Frankfurt School, especially as these may be recovered and reconstructed in critical phenomenology. Our focus will be on Habermas' two recent, translated essays on moral development and the problem of identity and on his study of Legitimation Crisis. Habermas' evolutionary categorical approach to the reconstruction of the logic of development of both productive forces (technological development) and normative processes, and their synthesis in a multi-faceted concept of crisis (in advanced capitalism), is quite impressive. Nevertheless, it does not

525 transform the modern age subjectivist understanding of the life-world and its structures and the anthropological deference underlying Habermas' critique of technological rationality, which is "cashed in" as its objectivist complement. Habermas' "complimentary" approach to systems theory has an appeal for academic social scientists who want to strike a "critical" pose and yet live peacefully with their more dominating "orthodox" colleagues. Apparently some radical intellectuals are also prepared to "go along" with modern vehicles of Enlightenment by invoking "Marxism" as a form of "systems theory," thus blurring major issues that should be relatively clear from recent debates, e.g. concerning "structuralism" and "functionalism." More careful study of Legitimation Crisis may reveal an encounter with fundamental problems in the critique of rationality in modern Western civilization that merit a deeper response. 67 Habermas' categorical logic of practical learning is developed to render the immanence of truth in practical reason and in terms of the latter's theoretical connections with the social totality (i.e., the determining features of the historical interaction of "production" and "socialization" in particular societal epochs). His communication theory and his theory of knowledgeconstitutive interests are linked within an awesomely comprehensive theory of social evolution. His ultimate concern in Legitimation Crisis is to raise the question of the "organizational principle" of the next stage: either the "universalistic ethics" of what would be for him a "post-modern" society, or the "end of the individual" in what is sometimes called the "post-historic" society. There is a sense in which Habermas' critical theory makes "war" with what may be called the "Myth of Technocracy" while it engages in much more limited contest with technocracy as an emergent phase of "late capitalist" society. His theory seems to strike a certain compromise with the intellectual and institutional trends comprising this technocratic juggernaut in order to gather the resources for the Armageddon, i.e., the societal evolution that would "realize" the Myth. It may be that Habermas has learned both too much and too little from Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Raising the specter of "mysticism" against his mentors' struggle toward a critical theory and praxis within a dialectical horizon of the totality, he allows fundamental ground to be further shadowed by the "enlightenment" horizon of the technological world-picture in order to set up checks to the so-called systems of instrumental rationalization operating within that vision of worlddomination. He fails to realize that his intellectual compromise route splitting the horizon of the totalization - allows "critical theory" to work

526 from merely one side of a duplex house constructed according to a technological world-grid contracted out to the institutions of modern industrial capitalism. In short, Habermas has bedded down with the concept of subjectivity which led his Frankfurt mentors into an "iron cage" or "one dimensional" theory of reification insofar as they were unable to divorce the concept from the predialectical duplex arrangement of the modern age. Casting aside "mystical" visions of a "new science," a "new sensibility," the "liberation of nature," and so on, critical theory henceforth is to assume the dutiful role of "housewife" of the "symbolic lifeworld." Its job is to tend the "cultural meanings" that leaven the instrumental projects which increase "power over the environment," while facilitating the integration of "differentiated learning" which includes "moral development" with increased "role competency." Technocracy, as distinguished from the Myth of Technocracy, seems to be accepted as an established operative paradigm (theoretically elaborated as systems theory) in Habermas's analysis of "late capitalism" in Legitimation Crisis. The concept of "motivation crises" is central to the consideration of possible alternative forms of political development. Yet the latter are threatened in the long run by the prospect of an "uncoupling [of] the cultural system." And for the short-run, as "long as the welfare-state program, in conjunction with a widespread, technocratic common consciousn e s s . . , can maintain a sufficient degree of civil privatism, legitimation needs do not have to culminate in a crisis." Habermas avers that both "paradigms, life-world and system, are important," but it is only a truncated "life-world" concept that is employed in pursuit of the "logic of legitimation problems ?,68 His meager conception of the Lebenswelt rests upon his perspective of the dual determination of the self-constitution of the human species as developing out of the historical configurations of instrumental and symbolic interaction systems. As he put it in his critique of Marcuse's idea of a new science, the "reflection that the new [technocratic] ideology calls for must penetrate beyond the level of particular historical class interests to disclose the fundamental interests of mankind as such engaged in the process of self-constitution. ''69 Habermas attempts to ground the "emancipatory interest" in the universal pragmatics of rational discourse, but in our view he fails to deeply illuminate the human foundations of concrete questions of historical action and meaning crucial for the dialectical theory of social change. Nevertheless, critical political theory in America owes a great deal to Habermas, especially through Trent Schroyer's imaginative and critical reconstructions of his thought. They have clarified critical inquiry, especially with regard to the way American political actors are "wedded to an in-

527 strumental concept of reason whose one-sidedness has the consequence of blocking our capacity to recognize the socio-cultural significance of our acts and has lowered our capacity to act intelligently in novel situations. ''7~ Yet the major flaw in Habermas' theory on which Schroyer's attention has been focused is "the conception of the link between critique and emancipation. ''71 In his 1973 study, Schroyer noted that it is the "formalistic utopian moment" of Habermas' theory that is too narrow and in need of development. Unlike Schroyer, however, we think that these limitations may be traced to problems at the foundation of the theory; indeed, other critics have begun to excavate these essential issues. 7z Wolf Lepenies, for example, has suggested that Habermas' argumentation "implicitly acknowledges the premises of the technocratic thesis" of post-historic society and attempts a limited recuperation by establishing an institutional theory on the basis of a "rigid anthropological scheme (i.e. of a rigidly enlightenment kind). ''Ta Habermas takes very seriously the argument that identity problems "can present themselves meaningfully only for as long as societies are as a whole integrated into a symbolic life world. ''74 He says that it is an "open question whether in complex societies motive formation is actually still tied to norms that require justification, or whether norm systems have lost their relation to truth. ''Ts How crucial this question is was made apparent by Habermas' observation that a "legitimation crisis.., must be based on a motivation crisis - that is, a discrepancy between the need for motives declared by the state, the educational system and the occupational system on the one hand, and the motivation supplied by the socio-cultural system on the other. ''~6 The argument, to which Habermas's own critique of technocracy has lent much weight, is that social integration "increasingly seems to get substituted by systems integration. And the more this happens, the more identity problems become obsolete. ''7~ Habermas comes very close to accepting the radical version of this thesis of "the end of the individual," a tendency evident in his respectful treatment of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory and his extremely modest effort of supplementation with a "communicative planning theory" aiming at the conceptual rehabilitation of "a truth-dependent mode of socialization constitutive of society. ''Ts At the center of this effort, against Adorno's negative dialectics "without a standpoint," Habermas puts "a logic of development." But it must be emphasized that Habermas' project of a logic of development and a universal communicative ethic with its ideals of "undistorted language communication" and "unconstrained ego identity" is launched from within the confines of certain basic concepts which the early Frankfurt theorists never

528 quite succeeded in transcending in spite of their demolition of leading bourgeois predialectical formulations. As Habermas states, I believe that Adorno and Marcuse, through an over-suggestive observation and an oversimplified interpretation of certain tendencies, have gone astray by developing a left counterpart to the theory of totalitarian domination popular at the time. I mention this only to draw attention to the fact that critical social theory still holds fast to the concept of the autonomous Ego, on which it supports its gloomy predictions, and that this Ego has lost its basis. Adorno also constantly refused to explain directly the normative content of basic concepts. To specify the structures of the ego which are mutilated in the totalized society would be seen by Adorno as a false positivism. 79 Nevertheless, Habermas attempts to salvage a "dialectical concept of egoidentity with the crude tools of the sociological theory of action and without fear of a false positivism. ''8~ The question that must be asked is whether Habermas, considering fundamental principles of his theory of "undistorted communication" and human emancipation, moves "back" toward Kantianism and the "identity principle" of the "dialectic of enlightenment." He attempts to move beyond Adorno's negative dialectical treatment of freedom as merely the counterplot tied to the structure of compulsion by claiming that this " structure is "not ultimate; it has its basis in the logic of undistorted language communication. ''Sx What he goes on to say is very revealing. "In a certain way, mature autonomy [Mundigkeit] is the sole idea which we have at our disposal in the sense of the philosophical tradition - as I asserted in my Frankfurt inaugural lecture - for in every speech act the telos of reaching an understanding [Verstaendigung] is already inherent. ''82 John Viertel, who translated Theory and Practice into English, explains that Mundigkeit means: literally "majority" in the sense "legally of age." For Kant, mankind's "majority" is the historical goal of enlightenment (in "What is Enlightenment?"). To preserve this developmental connotation I have generally preferred "mature autonomy. ''83 Habermas states, in a very matter of fact way, that "to the extent that world-views are impoverished, morality too is formalized and detached from substantive interpretation." It would seem to be a fait accompli with the result that "communicative ethics appeals now only to fundamental norms of rational speech, an ultimate 'fact of reason'. ''a4 One gathers that Habermas' self-imposed task is. the development of "communicative ethics" (3 la

529 Kohlberg and others) in terms of his project of a theory of communicative competence. But if the Habermas-Berger modernist concept of "world view ''Ss is not acceptable, it may be suggested that this state of affairs in "communicative ethics" reflects the ascendancy of the technological worldview over its traditional part-time competitors. In fact, this is the perspective that should encompass our understanding of the critique of Kantian moralism and "model of maturity" by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic o f Enlightenment. 86 Habermas' project of a "communicative ethics" seems to be less committed to a search for post-modern grounds than that of his Frankfurt predecessors, for it seems intended merely to "go beyond" by building upon Kant's formalistic ethics. We suggest that there is less awareness of the pitfalls of a "morality based on principles," although there can be no doubt of an advance in Habermas' development of the "model of the suppression of generalizable interests. ''87 Indeed, in some ways it seems that Habermas offers a master paradigm for Kant's recent followers in psychology and ethics. In "Moral Development and Ego Identity," Habermas attempts to lay out a logic of development and then to derive Kohlberg's stages of moral consciousness or development from it. In effect, he attempts to rehabilitate the concept of the autonomous Ego or, perhaps better, a "model of an unconstrained ego identity" as the developmental keystone of his communication theory of society. Quoting Habermas' formulation of the project's essential tasks: I will isolate a central and well examined aspect of ego development, namely moral consciousness, but I will here consider only the cognitive side, the capacity for moral judgment. After this I would also like to show that Kohlberg's stages of moral consciousness satisfy the formal conditions of a logic of development, since I will reformulate these stages into the framework of a general theory of action. 1 also want to remove the restrictions on the cognitive side of communicative activity and show that ego-identity demands not only the cognitive mastery of general communication levels, but also the ability to bring one's own needs to the fore in this communication structure. So long as the Ego restricts itself from its inner nature and denies the dependence of its needs, which are still waiting for an adequate interpretation, that freedom, which is still so thoroughly grounded in principles, remains in truth unfree with respect to existing systems of norms. 88

530 Habermas is particularly intent on showing that the '"increasing mastery of the basic structures of possible communication and the correlative increase in context independence of the active subject correspond to a graduated role competency" which he discusses in some detail. 89 His conclusion is that the "systematic derivation of the stages of moral consciousness from role competence shows that Kohlberg's stages are incomplete. ''9~ He adds to Kohlberg's scheme a seventh stage, that of "a universal speech ethic" and elaborates upon its function in the cultural interpretation of individual needs in such a way as to at least suggest a linkage to a critical hermeneutics of the body-politic. But this linkage is clouded by his renewed invocation of an ideal concept of ego identity "on the way to autonomy and . . . a field independent style of perception and thinking ''91 - a statement following this important passage: This dual status of ego identity [apparently the gap between moral insight and the means of practical action] reflects not only the cognitivemotivational duality of ego development, but also the interdependence of society and nature which permeates the formation of identity. The model of an unconstrained ego identity is more exact and richer than an autonomy model that is developed exclusively out of a moral perspective. This can be seen in our completed hierarchy of the stages of moral consciousness. One can understand the meaning of the transition from the sixth to the seventh stage, i.e., from a formalistic ethic of duty to a universal speech ethic in that interpretations of needs are no longer assumed as given, but are embedded in the discursive formation of the will. In this way, inner nature is shifted into a utopian perspective. At this stage, the inner nature need no longer be scrutinized within a natural interpretation frame fixed by cultural traditions by an egotistically applied principle of universalization. Nor need it then be split into legitimate and illegitimate components, duties and inclinations. The inner nature is made communicatively clear and transparent to the extent that needs can be linguistically preserved through aesthetic forms of expression or released from their paleosymbolic, prelinguistic state. That means, however, that the inner nature in its provisional, prior cultural preformation is not subjugated to the claims of ego autonomy, but maintains itself through a free access to interpretation possibilities of the cultural tradition. 92 While we are critical of the apparent philosophical bases of Habermas' specific formulations of Mundigkeit, we note that his communicative ethics does advance well beyond Kohlberg's theory toward a critical political hermeneutics. Furthermore, on certain levels of theoretization, Habermas clearly

531 improves upon the "radical humanist" perspectives of Hampden-Turner who contends that : The success of the whole enterprise of higher learning must depend upon the adequate representation of human needs in the rapidly growing complex of abstract thought and knowledge. So long as sociopsychological disciplines remain such infant sciences the very process of abstraction, systemization, and computerized thinking will tend to swamp our meagre knowledge of humanity beneath a mass of hard, nonhuman, data from the developed sciences. Our intuitive needs and feelings are still the best psychology we have. That is why men must periodically strip themselves of technological, economic and scientific pre-calculations and say to each other, "what as mere human beings do we need and desire?" Only after these desires are expressed and agreed upon is it once more possible to reassemble the vast technological and bureaucratic apparatus as our servant instead of our master. This is the lesson of T-Groups. Is it also what rebel students have been trying to tell us? 9a Habermas shares this hopeful interest in themes of student activity and elaborates them in a theory of how "a morality based on principle can be credibly offered by tradition only in the form of communicative ethics, which cannot function without conflict in the political-economic system ...,,,94 a structure promoting identity crises and problems including life-style patterns of withdrawal and protest as described, for example, by Keniston. Perhaps one of the most significant themes that might be developed out of Habermas's writings is that of the "temporal structure of a futureoriented remembrance. ''gs In turning to the work of Hampden-Turner and Habermas, we hope to have drawn out more explicitly the restorative element of a critical hermeneutics, one which surpasses the tyranny of the categorical in Kohlberg's research by founding the possibilities and anticipations of psycho-political development in the multi-leveled structures of the life-world. Merleau-Ponty and Paci have pioneered in the development of a critical phenomenology of the life-world and its modes amid the wider matrices of socio-historical praxis, a development out of and beyond that Husserl who knew that the crisis of the sciences was the crisis of humanity. He rediscovered the dialectic while denouncing the mythology of the Kantian transcendental ego in order to bring the ego back to the concrete monad. He brought the "past" back to the real world without transforming the latter into the arranged world of the categories of the intellect. 96

532 It is in critical phenomenological studies that we find a pathbreaking exploration of the dialectical interrelationships of the forms of logical objectivity and the modes of carnal intersubjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty and Paci, the "categorical attitude," instead of being considered the act of a pure spirit, presupposes a live functioning of the "inner forms of language," or, more broadly, an active subject whose words are embodied in the Sprachleib with its characteristic dynamics of sedimentation and awakening and continual passage between langue and parole. 9~From their work we can better appreciate the significance of the post-modern ontology of concrete meaning for critical theory, which unfolds in a dialectical phenomenology of need interrelating the categorical and precategorical levels of intersubjective existence. It is in this domain that the critical phenomenology of the life-world renders access (via thematization, temporalization) to functioning life and its modalities (Paci), in short, to the "foundation" of a thoroughly critical hermeneutics which Habermas' categorically dualistic theory misses or at least glides over. Habermas' contribution to a critical hermeneutics of politics must be assessed as a highly confined one, linguistically delimited to certain domain-levels and modes of contemporary culture, by those of us who fail to be persuaded as to the "critical potential" of his categorial dualism. He holds that the "interpretation of needs, themselves, that which each individual believes ought to be understood and represented as his 'true' interests, can first become an object of practical discourse only at the stage of a universal speech-ethic. ''98 This formulation comes from the essay appropriating Kohlberg's schema which he claims to "complete" with the "stage" just mentioned. Nevertheless, in "On Social Identity," Habermas admits that: norm and value-forming communications do not always take the precise form of discourse: they are not in all cases institutionalized, but rather they are often diffuse and appear under a variety of definitions. Emanating from "the base," they penetrate into the pores of spheres of life which are formally organized. In this sense, they are a sub-political process operating below the threshold of political decision-making: nonetheless, they affect the political system, albeit indirectly, through their impact on the normative frame of political decisions. The current debate concerning the "quality of life" is an indication of transformations of public issues affected, as it were, sub-cutaneously. 99 What is called for is a "thematization" of this "sub-political process" in terms of Merleau-Ponty's sense of history as the intermonde, a symbolic interworld of truth-to-be-made rooted in primordial structures of intersubjective

533 recognition. Any version of critical theory or phenomenology that can only make of symbolic forms a matter of subjective appropriation not only cannot "criticize the base" (as Marx would say) but cannot account for the unfolding of the "communications... emanating from 'the base' " alluded to by Habermas. Idealist phenomenology does indeed fall short here, as David Rasmussen has argued, but so does Habermas' theory, which does not adequately link critique and emancipation, especially in certain fields of sociohistorical praxis. A critical phenomenology, however, can and does make the "historical decision regarding that symbolic structure" (commodity fetishism) which is the "center of meaning" (in its hegemonic institutional forms) within industrial capitalist society. 1~176 As has been shown in another paper, critical phenomenology casts the ballots of that "pre-political suffrage" (O'Neill), burdened by institutional inertia and ideologically masked to be sure, yet which, disclosing the basic meaning-structures through which we inhabit the world, could help inaugurate a new norm of political society.1~ Habermas, as we have seen, alludes to this level of life-world and praxis but nowhere, to our knowledge, adequately accounts for it.

Habermas and those of his American followers who take up his categorical distinction between the problems of symbolically mediated interaction and the "dialectics of labor" (as a realm centered in "instrumental action") sometimes drastically oversimplify alternative conceptions of culture. For example, the concept of culture is polarized as either "arising directly out of instinctual drives or out of conflicts between them" or "only through the unique action of a consciousness characterized by its ability to produce symbolic representations. ''1~ Of course they opt for the latter pole in terms of which they promote Habermas' contribution. Rejecting an overly naturalistic conception of instinctual dynamics and needs (attributed to Marcuse) should not facilitate an uncritical appropriation of Habermas' concept of communicative action which tends to a notion of disembodied needs. As one of the present authors is concerned to show in another paper, 1~ a truly dialectical theory must account for the "element of otherness" in the needsobjects nexus in terms of a non-subjectivist theory of "subjectivity," i.e., the theory of the life-world and the material, concrete apriori, the latter constituting a central problematic of the "historical matter" of social praxis. Adorno's stress on the "object's preponderance" in his negative dialectics was a brilliant maneuver against a shallow, all too modern "humanist" response to reification, but ultimately it failed to correct his one-sided concept of subjectivity. Adorno's remark that "pure immediacy and fetishism are equally untrue" should be understood in light of Merleau-Ponty's theme that "truth dwells in the secret order of embodied subjects" before being manifest and

534 "objective. ''1~ To "tell this secret" in a critical hermeneutics of the bodypolitic is the permanent revolutionary task that breaks the spell of the dialectic of subjectivism and objectivism, of our programmed fantasies of "pure immediacy" and "total reification." Telling this secret in social praxis restores the key chapter in the history of the absence of man which allows the "readers" a further narrative affirmation of the presence of man and world in a less mystifying and de-humanizing society. As in John O'Neill's reading of Marx, 9 the object of Capital is not its topic, i.e., the analysis of the structures of surplus-value formation but its objective, namely, the recovery of the subjective axioms of objectification in alienated and non-alienated modes of expression [emphasis added] . . . Habermas has argued that Marx's phenomenology is inadequate because he reduced the synthesis of the moral and political grammar of the human ideal to the materialist synthesis of species reproduction. But this, of course, is the product of Habermas's own reduction of historical materialism, which creates the need to recover the absence of men by turning in part to Hegel and Freud. The failure to read the absence of man in Marx's texts is itself a historical and political failure . . . . [The failing method in question] . . . is the weapon of the Party with its back to history and the education of mankind) ~ In short, O'Neill proposes another approach to the problem of grounding, the normativity of critical theory, than that taken by Habermas. He has outlined a critical hermeneutics of the body-politic that is phenomenologically rooted in "the collective focus of seeing and being seen that is the ground of social life."l~ has taken the critical phenomenological path blazed by Merleau-Ponty in whose notion of institution we may find a "conception of reflexivity which, instead of resting upon a transcendental subjectivity, is given in a field of presence and coexistence which situates reflexivity and truth as sedimentation and search. We must think of reflexivity as tied to the textual structures of temporality and situation through which subjectivity and objectivity are constituted as the intentional unity and style of the world. ''1~ As Paul Ricoeur has put it in his penetrating discussion of the debate between Habermas and Gadamar: There are no other paths, in effect, for carrying out our interest in emancipation than by incarnating it within cultural acquisitions. Freedom only posits itself by transvaluating what has already been evaluated. The ethical life is a perpetual transaction between the project of freedom and

535

its ethical situation outlined by the given world of institutions... Freedom remains an empty concept as long as it is limited to reaffirming the idealist concept of a self-reflection which the theory of interest should have rendered impossible. And freedom is a fanatical concept as long as it simply remains the negation of every mediation) ~ We conclude that the pragmatics of communicative competence must be recontextualized within this larger critical and more deeply dialectical theory of totality and temporality, hopefully illuminating radically democratic modes of struggle with the hegemony of alienating institutions and their "historical blocs." NOTES 1.

For an elaboration of the dialectic of scientism and subjectivism in its various manifestations, including its relation to inadequacies of the New Left in the United States, see Reid's comments in Herbert G. Reid and Ernest J. Yanarella, "Toward a Post-Modern Theory of American Political Science and Culture: Perspectives from Critical Marxism and Phenomenology," Cultural Hermeneutics 11 (August 1974), pp. 128-138,passim. 2. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay o17 Liberation (Boston, 1969); and Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston, 1972). 3. Piaget's most influential work for Kohlberg is his The Moral Judgment of the Child (London, 1968). For Kohlberg's most extensive statement of his theory, see "Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization," in David A. Goslin, ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (Chicago, 1969), pp. 347-480. 4. Lukfics,' History and Class-Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Boston, 1968), p. 38. 5. The corpus of Kohlberg's writing is sizable, and we direct the reader to a collection of his essays available through the Harvard Center for Moral Education: Lawrence Kohlberg, Collected Papers on Moral Development and Moral Education (Cambridge, Spring 1973). 6. Kohlberg in - among other places - his contribution, "Moral Development," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), p. 490. 7. Kohlberg, "From Is to Ought: How to Commit the Naturalistic Fallacy and Get Away With It in the Study of Moral Development," in Theodore Mischel, ed., Cognitive Development and Epistemology (New York, 1971), p. 175. 8. These four points are presented in ibid., though the last quotation is from Kohlberg and Gilligan, "The Adolescent as Philosopher: The Discovery of the Self in a Postconventional World," Daedalus C (Fall 1971), p. 1058. 9. In criticizing the work of Kohlberg and in particular the foundations of his tacit interpretive framework, we wish to acknowledge that the research of Kohlberg and his followers is an ongoing enterprise, not a completed project, and that critical analyses like the present exercise may precipitate further changes in its prevailing ideological and philosophical grounding. What is more, however embedded in Lockean ideological tendencies and Kantian epistemological biases Kohlberg's thinking may be, the potential contribution of the Kohlbergian school to radicalizing Western thought may well overflow the ideological and episte-

536

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

mological confines within which we situate his work. If, for example, his research on moral development has the broader intellectual and social impact of helping to dispell the myth of "value-free" social science among its practitioners and the populace at large, the value of his writings to this larger post-modern task will not be insignificant. Buck-Morss, "Socio-Economic Bias in Piaget's Theory and its Implications for Cross-Culture Studies," Human Development 18 (1975), pp. 3 5 - 4 8 . Elizabeth Simpson, "Mdral Development Research: A Case of Scientific Cultural Bias," Human Development 17 (1974), pp. 8 1 - 1 0 6 . For a critical reconstruction of this argument in a depth-hermeneutic way, see Reid's analysis in Reid and Yanarella, "Toward a Post-Modern Theory . . . " op. eit., pp. 124-138. (2ited by Gary Wills, Nixon Agonistes (New York, 1970), pp. 314-315. C. Wright Mills, "Liberal Values in the Modern World," in I. L. Horowitz, ed., Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C Wright Mills (New York, 1963), pp. 187-195. This brief period represents the zenith of the New Left as a critical movement, and is surveyed in some detail by Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York, 1973), pp. 4 2 - 2 0 3 . Walter Dean Burnham, "Crisis of American Political Legitimacy," Society 10 (November-December 1972), pp. 2 4 - 3 1 , esp. p. 30. Indeed, awareness of the stagnation of Lockeanism had become so pervasive by the mid-seventies that a political analyst from the harvard Business College, George C. Lodge, could make its replacement (a "new American ideology") a top priority on the corporate agenda. See George C. Lodge, The New American Ideology (New York, 1975). Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," Review of Metaphysics XXV (September 1971), p. 39. Ibid., pp. 3 9 - 4 0 . Simpson, "Morall Development Research," op. cir., p. 100. D.C. Phillips and Mavis Kelly, "Hierarchical Theories of Development in Education and Psychology," Ifarvard Educational Review 45 (August 1975), pp. 366-367. Simpson, op. eit., p. 91. See Kohlberg's discussion of Piaget in: "Moral Development," op. cir., pp. 4 8 8 - 4 8 9 ; and "Stage and Sequence," op. eit., pp. 3 9 0 - 3 9 1 , 4 0 7 , 4 2 9 and 430. In this section, no consideration will be given to the positive aspects of Kant's epistemological revolution in Western philosophy or to the productive role of Kantianism as a forerunner of dialectical thought in the German idealist tradition. Nor will we attempt to offer a thorough-going criticism of Piaget's rich and complex research, which is hardly exhausted by a critique of the shortcomings of the Kantian dimensions of his thinking. Our focus will be on the manner in which Kohlberg's more fundamental and less reflective appropriation of Kantianism makes him vulnerable to significant criticism from the standpoint of critical phenomenology. D.W. Hamlyn, "Epistemology and Conceptual Development," in Theodore Mischel, ed., Epistemology and Cognitive Development, op. cit., p. 15. See Luk~cs' critique of Kant in the section, "The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought," in History and Class-Consciousness, op. tit., pp. 110-149. Buck-Morss, "Sdcio-Economic Bias in Piaget's Theory," op. tit., p. 39. Ibid., p. 44. See ibid., p. 44; and Simpson, op. tit., pp. 87, 91 and 92. Were Kohlberg willing to suspend his Kantian framework, he might be able to appreciate the significance of the research of cultural anthropologists and socio-linguists on so-called "primitive" tribes and cultures.

537 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

Michael Maccoby and Nancy Modiano, "On Culture and Equivalence: i , " in Jerome Brunet, et aL, Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York, Inc., 1966), p. 269. A more elaborate statement of this point would seek to reformulate and appropriate this observation in a critical phenomenological way. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic o f Enlightenment (New York, 1972), pp. 81-119. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, 1973), p. 265. Horkheimer and Adorno, op. cit., p. 86. Ibid., pp. 114-115. Adorno offers a somewhat toned-down critique of Kant in Negative Dialectics (New York, 1973). Cited by Kenneth Keniston, "Idealists: The Perils of Principle," Youth and Dissent: The Rise o f the New Opposition (New York, 1971), pp. 2 5 6 - 2 6 1 ; and Charles Hampden-Turner and Philip Whitten, "Morals Left and Right" Psychology Today (April 1971), pp. 40, 74 and 75. Hampden-Turner and Whitten, op. cit., p. 74. Kohlberg's own interpretation of the issue of "structural retrogression" (as he calls it) has recently undergone some modification. He now rejects his earlier stance and posits a stage 4 1/2 to categorize the supposed transition phase between stages 4 and 5 of some of his subjects. The reader may wish to examine the multiple reasons for this change in Kohlberg's essay, "Continuities in Childhood and Adult Moral Development Revisited," in Kohlberg and Turiel, eds., Moralization: The Cognitive Developmental Approach (New York, forthcoming). The recategorization does little to alter our fundamental point about the latent sources of regression. That is, our interpretation speaks to the more critical matter of the cultural seedbed of instances of moral retrogression in Western societies, however structurally "sophisticated" their argumentative form may be. See, e.g., Norma Haan, et al., "Moral Reasoning of Young Adults," Journal of Personality and SocialPsyehology 10 (1968), pp. 183-201. Hampden-Turner and Whitten, op. cit., p. 75. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man," The Primao, of Perception and Other Essays (Evanston, Ill., 1964), p. 72. See Reid, "Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Change," a June 1975 paper, revised April 1976, pp. 1 0 - 2 3 . Keniston, "Idealists: The Perils of Principle," op. eit., pp. 2 5 1 - 2 6 8 . In critically appropriating Keniston's criticism for our purposes, we wish to note that we depart from his reform-liberal orientation in our intention to refound our critique of Kohlberg upon a genuinely post-liberal and post-modern grounding. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 268. T.W. Adorno, et aL, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950); Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit.; Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York, 1941); and Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962). O'Neill, "Embodiment and Child Development: A Phenomenological Approach," in Hans Peter Dreitzel, ed., Childhood and Socialization: Recent Sociology, No. 5 (New York, 1973), p. 70. The comment presented by O'Neill is actually a critical reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty's critique of Piaget in the Bulletin de Psychologie 236 (November 1964), esp. pp. 130-134, 187-194, 2 0 4 - 2 1 0 , and his development of the theme of embodiment in Phenomenology o f Perception (New York, 1962), esp. pp. 239 and 255. Also relevant here is Richard Zaner's essay, "Piaget and Merleau-Ponty: A Study in Convergence," Review o f Existential Psychology VI (Winter 1966), pp. 7 - 2 3 , though a careful reading of Merleau-Ponty's critique discloses that Zaner overstates the degree of convergence on key issues.

538 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

David Rasmussen, "Between Autonomy and Sociality," Cultural Hermeneutics I (1973), p. 9. Ibid., pp. 1 7 - 1 9 . Kohlberg, "The Moral Atmosphere of the School," in N. Overley, ed., The Unstudied Curriculum (Washington, D.C., 1970), p. 125. See, e.g., Kohlberg's 6omment on Rawls in "Moral Development and the New Social Studies," Social Education 37 (May 1973), p. 371. Kohlberg's work on moral education includes the following essays: "Moral and Religious Education and the Public Schools: A Developmental View," in T. Sizer, ed., Religion and Public Education (Boston, 1967); "Moral Development and the New Social Studies," op. cit.; "A Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Moral Education," The Humanist (November-December 1972), pp. 1 3 - 1 6 ; and with Rochelle Mayer, "Development as an Aim of Education," Harvard Educational Review 42 (November 1972), pp. 4 4 9 - 4 9 6 ; and with Gordon Lesser, ed., Psychology and Educational Practice (Chicago, 1971), p p . 4 1 0 - 4 6 5 . For an overview of this body of writings, see Michael Schleifer, "Moral Education and Indoctrination," Ethics 86 (January 1976), pp. 154-163. Norman Jacobson, "Political Science and Political Education," American Political Science Review LVII (September 1963), pp. 5 6 1 - 5 6 9 ; Darryl Baskin, American Pluralist Democracy: A Critique (New York, 1971); and Robert Pranger, The Eclipse o f Citizenship (New York, 1968). This critical hermeneutics of the body politic - drawing upon the post-modern directions of Ricoeur, O'Neill, Merleau-Ponty, Rovatti, and Paci - has only begun as a collective enterprise. For some dialectical perspectives, see Reid, "Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Changes," op. cit., pp. 1-9. See also, Paul Ricoeur's important comments on hermeneutics in dialectical perspective in his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, 1970), pp. 3 - 5 6 ; and John O'Neill's remarks on the body politic - Sociology as a Skin Trade (New York, 1972). George Gallup, "Many Favor Teaching Morals in Public School," The Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, April 18, 1976, p. A7. The poll also revealed that two-thirds of the nationwide sample believed that today people generally do not lead as "good lives - honest and moral - as they used to." To get some idea how educators and policy-makers are taking advantage of this turn in public opinion, see the special issue, "The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Moral Education," Edwin Fenton, ed., Social Education 40 (April 1976). Charles Hampden-Turner, Radical Man: The Process o f Psycho-Social Development (Garden City, N.Y., 1971). /bid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., pp. 5 4 - 5 5 . In a manner akin to Erikson, he shows how synergistic relations between blacks and whites could lead to a wider identity for both groups which would not sacrifice the unique contributions of each to the more encompassing identities attained. See ibid., p. 151. This point is developed extensively in HampdenTurner's latest book, From Poverty to Dignity (Garden City, N.Y., 1974). Hampden-Turner, Radical Man, op. cit., pp. 4 3 - 4 5 , and esp. pp. 132 and 133. This portrait is a composite of the existential features attributed to "radical man," ibid., pp. 43, 45,47, 48 and 49. Reid in Herbert G. Reid and Randal H. Ihara, "Ideology and Problems of Student Consciousness in the United States," Cultural Hermeneutics III, 3 (forthcoming), pp. 5 and 6 of the manuscript. Indeed Hampden-Turner fails to appreciate the

539

61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

philosophical and political importance not only of the lifeworld, but also of dialectics. His notion of synergy reduces to a mechanistic balance (see op. cit., pp. 128, 129, 231-232) and his "dialectics" becomes mere pseudo-dialectical posturing (see ibid., pp. 44, 54, and 5 8 - 5 9 ) . Ibid., pp. 158,165, and 170. Ibid., p. 332. Interestingly, Hampden-Turner remains faithful to his subjectivistic foundations by claiming that while "man models organizations upon an image of himself" (P. 150), there is no structural equivalent to the first segment of the psycho-social cycle which states that "man exists freely" (ibid.). See Chapters 7 and 8. The moralistic tone of his writing is evident throughout, and has been previously noted by John Grady in his review of Radical Man in Telos 6 (Fall 1970), pp. 325-335. The relation between his moralism and his tacit liberal theory of institutions is an important topic which might be explored in another context. Hampden-Turner, op. cit., pp. 136 and 161. See especially Hampden-Turner and Whitten, "Morals Left and Right," op. eit., and Hampden-Turner, "Radical Man and the Hidden Moralities of Social Science," Interpersonal Development 2 (1971/1972), pp. 222-237, specifically p. 224. This remarkable work raises several vital issues for critical political theory and obviously already has generated a great deal of controversy. In the present context, we have no choice but to avoid directly engaging some of the issues in these emergent controversies. No doubt Habermas' effort to reconstruct rational normative foundations of science and interaction is one working project in critical political theory warranting extraordinary hope. Nevertheless, a warning must be entered against tendencies toward intellectual closure where the problem of grounding the normative bases of critique and emancipation is concerned. Jtirgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Thomas MeGarthy, trans. (Boston, 1975). See especially Chapter 1, "System and Life-World" and pp. 90, 74 (for the two quotations in the text). It should be stressed that our consideration of Habermas is primarily focused upon his ideas concerning "moral development," "motivation crisis," and the "logic of legitimation problems," especially his "logic of development" as it relates to his approach to hermeneutics. Jt~rgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, Jeremy Shapiro, trans. (Boston, 1970), p. 113. James Miller's interesting and helpful review of Legitimation Crisis puts this point into perspective. Miller refers to Knowledge and Human Interests where Habermas claims to find not only in critical Marxism but also in Freudian psychoanalysis "a primordial urge to self-reflection, undertaken in the hopes of liberation from misunderstanding, delfision and domination." See Telos 25 (Fall, 1975), p. 215. For a rather harsh Habermasian response, see Jeremy J. Shapiro's "Reply" to Miller in Telos 27 (Spring, 1976), pp. 170-176. Trent Schroyer, "The Need for Critical Theory," The Insurgent Sociologist 111 (Winter, 1973), p. 31. For an attempt to outline these tasks in academic political education, see Reid and Ihara, "Ideology Critique and Problems of Student Consciousness in the United States," Cultural Hermeneutics 111 (1975) and Herbert G. Reid, ed. Up the Mainstream: A Critique o f Ideology in American Politics and Everyday Life (New York, 1974). Trent Schroyer, The Critique o f Domination (New York, 1973), p. 34. Pier Aldo Rovatti, "Critical Theory and Phenomenology," Telos 15 (Spring, 1973); Oliva Blanchette, "Language, the Primordial Labor of History: A Critique of Critical Social Theory in Habermas," Cultural Hermeneuties I (1974), pp. 3 2 5 - 6 8 2 (a very important study); John Keane, "On Tools and Language: Habermas on Work and Interaction," New German Critique 6 (Fall, 1975),

540

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96.

"97.

pp. 8 2 - 1 0 0 ; John O'Neill, Sociology as a Skfl~ Trade (London, 1972), pp. 2 3 7 - 2 6 3 ; Vincent DiNorcia, "From Critical Theory to Critical Ecology," Telos 22 (Winter, 1974-1975), pp. 8 5 - 9 5 ; and Wolf Lepenies, "Anthropology and Social Criticism," The Human Context III (July, 1971), pp. 205-225. Wolf Lepenies, op. eit., pp. 2 2 0 - 2 2 5 . This is, in part, a very interesting comparative study of Arnold Gehlen and Habermas. Jtirgen Habermas, "On Social Identity," Telos 19 (Spring, 1974), p. 97. Legitimation Crisis, p. 117. Ibid., pp. 7 4 - 7 5 . Habermas, "On Social Identity," p. 98. Legitimation Crisis, pp. 140-142. Also see Chapter 1, "System and Life-World." However, he does state that there is "no adm#Tistrative production o f mean#Tg" (p. 7O). Habermas, "Moral Development and Ego Identity," Telos 24 (Summer, 1975), pp. 4 2 - 4 3 . Also see the discussion of Adorno and Marcuse in Reid, "Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Change." Ibid. See also Dick Howard's "Clarification" in Telos 27 (Spring, 1976), pp. 176-182. Jiirgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, John Viertel, trans. (Boston, 1973), p. 17. Ibid. See Viertel's translator's note, p. viii. Oliva Blanchette also discusses this theme and its intellectual background in his Cultural Hermeneutics article on Habermas. This penetrating study illuminates several aspects of Habermas' inadequately dialectical theory of knowledge as social theory which fails to "properly pass from Kant to Marx" and, in fact, reduces "Marx to Kant" (p. 345). Legitimation Crisis, p. 120. Ibid., p. 118. Habermas draws upon Peter Berger's study, The Sacred Canopy. For a discussion of the concept of the technological world-view in relation to Dialectic o f Enlightenment, see Reid, "Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Change" and the Cultural Hermeneutics article by Reid and Yanarella. Legitimation Crisis, pp. 111-117. Trent Schroyer has expressed one of the most favorable views of Habermas's cognitivist linguistic ethics. See "The Repoliticization of the Relations of Production: An Interpretation of Jiirgen Habermas' Analytic Theory of Late Capitalist Development," New German Critique 5 (Spring 1975), pp. 107-128. "Moral Development and Ego Identity," p. 47. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid.,p. 55. Ibid., p. 54. Habermas' reference in the passage quoted to the "model of an unconstrained ego identity" might be examined in relation to the dialectic of nature and historical freedom discussed in "Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Change" (Reid) which draws upon relevant works of Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, and Paci. RadicalMan, pp. 2 0 2 - 2 0 3 . Legitimation Crisis, p. 92. "On Social Identity," p. 103. Cf. Herbert Reid, "The Polities of Time," The Human Context IV (Autumn, 1972), pp. 4 5 6 - 4 8 3 . Enzo Paci, The Function of the Sciences and the Mean#~g of Man, Paul Piccone and James Hansen, trans. (Evanston, 1972), p. 320. Cf. Giovanni Piana, "History and Existence in Husserl's Manuscripts," Telos 10 (Winter, 1971), pp. 86-124. See the book by Paci just noted, Chapter II, "The Dialectic of Language and the

541

98.

99.

100.

101.

102.

103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108.

Foundation of History," pp. 205-224; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France, 1952-1960, J. O'Neill trans. (Evanston, 1970), Chapter 3 "The Problem of Speech," pp. 27-38; and Reid's discussion of language, politics, and political theory in the concluding section to "Political Science and the Post-Modern Critique of Scientism and Domination," Review of Politics 37 (July, 1975), pp. 310-816. "Moral Deveiopment and Ego Identity," p. 52. Cf. Blanchette's argument in Cultural Hermeneutics 1 (1974), for example: "The social idea of the human spirit which emerged with Hegel and Marx is being brought back, as 'critical social theory', to an earlier, more naive and hence more dualistic, theory of knowledge, one that is still hung up on a need to bridge gaps supposed to exist between consciousness and reality and that therefore can posit freedom only as something apart from knowledge, or rather apart from a presumed absence of knowledge." (p. 362) "On Social Identity," p. 99. Cf. Reid's discussion of Marcuse and Aronowitz in "Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Change" for one way of developing these themes. David Rasmussen, "The Symbolism of Marx: From Alienation to Fetishism," Cultural Hermeneuties III (1975), p p . 4 1 - 5 5 , at p. 45. Enzo Paci's work is particularly important in this regard, as is the interpretation of the critique of fetishism by Pier Atdo Rovatti (see various Telos articles discussed in "Critical Phenomenology a n d . . . Social Change.") Reid, "Critical Phenomenology and the Dialectical Foundations of Social Change," manuscript, p. 32 of the April, 1976 revised version. "The point is that historical processes of reification and domination do not make subjectivity problematic by reference to the normative function of bourgeois ideals of individuality and freedom that might finally be realized in an abstract future society. Rather these processes frustrate the experimental movement toward a new, unified humanity, a movement that has as its immanent norm that "prepolitical suffrage" of a concretely transcendental intersubjectivity which simultaneously grounds and potentially undermines the appearances of both 'pure immediacy,' and 'fetishism.' " (p. 34) Bruce Brown, Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life (New York, 1973), pp. 80-81. For an argument that Habermas' dialectic of communication "is tantalizingly formalistic and poorly grounded" and tends to "hover over its potential subjects, offering few insights into questions of practical struggle and organizational priorities," see John Keane's New German Critique essay "On Tools and Language," pp. 99-100. Reid, "Critical P h e n o m e n o l o g y . . . " , Part 3 of the April, 1976 revision. Ibid. Merleau-Ponty's idea is developed in T h e m e s . . . and elsewhere. John O'Neill, "For Marx against Althusser," The Human Context VI (Summer, 1974), pp. 396-397. At p. 393, O'Neill comments: "The critical question in Capital, but also in every work of Marx, is how is it possible that the being who produces everything should produce his own non-being? How is it that the presence of man is the history of the absence of man?" John O'Neill, Making Sense Together (New York, 1974), p. 56. Sociology as a Skin Trade, p. 231. See also the article by Reid and Yanarella in Cultural Hermeneuties and the one by Reid and lhara in the same journal, op. tit. "Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue," David Pellauer, trans. Philosophy Today 17 (Summer, 1973), p. 165. This tentative critique of Habermas (above) is part of a larger, ongoing study of the Frankfurt School by Herbert Reid begun in the Fall of 1972.

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