Jurgen Habermas - Mitchell Stephens

"I think that a certain form of unrestrained communication brings to the fore the deepest force of reason, which enables us to overcome egocentric or ethnocentric perspectives and reach an expanded . . . view."

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"Habermas believes human social life rests on our capacity to have more or less clear communication with each other." We communicate -- to paraphrase Descartes -- therefore our society exists.

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In our "communicative actions," the right sees selfish individuals struggling to get a leg up on each other; the postmodern left sees the powerful exploiting the powerless; but Habermas sees, of all things, a kind of cooperation. Indeed, he shares with Socrates an almost utopian belief in the wholesomeness of debate and discussion.

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The Enlightenment, you see, left open a crucial question: How does reason -- at whose behest so much has been challenged -- justify itself? Reason has undercut our belief in the spiritual, in the traditional. What is to prevent reason from challenging reason? Why, in other words, should we believe in reason? In "communicative action," Habermas thinks he has come up with an answer.

Reason, he maintains, is crucial to clear communication. So, to oversimplify a little, if we believe in the importance of the universal human impulse to communicate, we have to believe in reason. The Enlightenment, Habermas concludes, continues to have "a sound core."

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"I have always been mystified by the attention that Habermas receives," Fish says. "His way of thinking about these matters seems to me to be obviously faulty. The only way I can explain it to myself is that Habermas represents something that a lot of people would like to buy into: He seems to offer a way out of corrosive relativism."

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So the battle lines have been drawn. Habermas, says Martin Jay, a history professor at UC Berkeley, is "a bulwark against some of the more problematic strains in postmodern thought." Habermas' book "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" defends modernism against the prefix that presumes to outdate it and criticizes various postmodern demigods -- including Foucault and Mr. Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. Rather than going beyond modernism, he argues, some of them have just wandered off on some of its more "negative" and "empty" byways.

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