A Case of Distorted Communication: A Note on Habermas and Arendt

A Case of Distorted Communication: A Note on Habermas and ArendtAuthor(s): Margaret CanovanSource: Political Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp. 105-116Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191011 .

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A CASE OF DISTORTED COMMUNICATION A Note on Habermas and Arendt

MARGARET CANOVAN Universitl of Keele

Hermeneutic understanding makes possible the form of unconstrained consensus and the type of open intersubjectivity on which communicative action depends.'

The work of Jurgen Habermas is celebrated for many reasons, but one aspect of his thought that has attracted particular interest in recent years is his theory of communicative competence. Habermas argues that implicit in all speech is the possibility of an ideal speech situation in which undistorted communication aims at rational consensus:

No matter how the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding may be deformed, the design of an ideal speech situation is necessarily implied in the structure of potential speech, since all speech, even of intentional deception, is oriented towards the idea of truth. This idea can only be analysed with regard to a consensus achieved in unrestrained and universal discourse. Insofar as we master the means for the construction of an ideal speech situation, we can conceive the ideas of truth, freedom and justice.2

Habermas's theory has caused great excitement -because it appears to promise an escape from the subjectivism characteristic of modern thought. He seems to give grounds for the hope that disputes even about intractable matters such as morality and politics can be settled by

A UTHOR'S NOTE: I wish to thank Ronald Beiner for his comments on a previous draft of this article.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. II No 1, February 1983 105-116 ? 1983 Sage Publications, Inc.

105 0090-5917 83 010105-12$1.45



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rational discourse, provided that the discourse is not blocked by the distortions induced by domination, ideology, and repression. The attractions of this theory are twofold. In the first place, it explicitly recognizes and allows for differences and dialogues between plural human beings. In Theory and Practice, Habermas criticized Kant's approach to moral theory for being "monologic." By thinking in terms of a single subject laying down laws for the human race, Kant in effect reduced moral interaction to the decisions of solitary, self-sufficient individuals, each acting as the sole representative of humanity.3 But the human condition is not one of identical, solitary minds laying down identical universal rules: It is a condition of communication and interaction among plural individuals with different points of view.

While arguing for the plurality of individuals, however, Habermas's view also avoids the subjectivism of saying that questions of morals and politics are simply matters of individual choice.4 He points out that our capacity to engage in rational discourse shows that we can in fact correct our individual views and advance from opinion to truth, which is the rational consensus reached among individuals in unconstrained discourse. The great attraction of this theory is that it appears to hold together in a dialectical unity two previously opposed notions: on the one hand, a recognition of the plurality and diversity of minds, and on the other an ideal of a single, objective truth.

This article is in no sense an attempt at the formidable task of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Habermas's theory. Neverthe- less, its subject, Habermas's interpretation of Hannah Arendt, does have an ironic relevance to his ideal of perfect communication.

II

In an address delivered at the New School for Social Research in 1980, Habermas acknowledged a profound intellectual debt to Hannah Arendt, and particularly to The Human Condition. It was Arendt, he said, who had revived the forgotten Aristotelian distinction between "praxis" and "poesis," thereby providing a much more adequate understanding of political action than those otherwise available. Whereas most contemporary action theories understand political practice in instrumental or strategic terms, on the model of individuals setting up goals and adjusting means to ends, Arendt provided a "concept of action as'praxis' which articulates the historical experiences



Canovan I HABERMAS AND ARENDT 107

and the normative perspectives of what we today call participatory democracy."5

Habermas distinguishes three particularly important features of Arendt's theory of action. The first is her stress on the plurality of individuals, "the multiple perspectives of participants who occupy inevitably different standpoints." The second feature is "the symbolic nature of the web of human relationships," or the role of communication in holding unique individuals together. The third is Arendt's concept of human "natality," her insistence that "the birth of every individual is the promise of a new beginning; to act means to be able to seize an initiative and to do the unanticipated." Habermas concludes, "I have learned from H. Arendt how to approach a theory of communicative action."6

If we accept this very handsome admission as it stands, then it seems obvious that Habermas and Arendt must be closely connected and their views very similar. This would be so whether we were to think of Arendt as a forerunner of Habermas, or to reverse the emphasis and see Habermas taking Arendt's theory to its logical conclusion. But the irony of the situation is that their intellectual relationship is quite different from this. Habermas certainly owes a great deal to Arendt, and certainly did find in her work the features he mentions. However, in the course of taking up her ideas, he transformed them very considerably, with the result that what he learned from Arendt was not quite what she would have liked to teach him. Having had his own (extremely original) thought processes triggered by Arendt, Habermas then proceeded to read his own ideas back into her books, in the process missing or distorting much of what she wanted to say.

Needless to say, there is nothing unusual about this, for creative misreading is one of the most familiar features of intellectual life. The interest of the encounter, however, is that it is a textbook case of a form of distorted communication that does not figure in Habermas's theory: the distortion caused not by domination, ideology or neurosis, but by sheer intellectual vitality on the part of the reader.

We can see these distortions at work in an essay on "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power," which Habermas wrote for the commemorative issue of Social Research devoted to her work.7 This is a breathtaking piece, for what Habermas does is to translate Arendt's concepts into his own terminology, read his own theory into them, and then, when forced to recognize that her conclusions are different from his, accuse her of failing to realize the implications of her own theory.




His account is dominated by his overriding interest in communication and rational agreement, which elbows out Arendt's own concern with political action and worldly institutions. According to Habermas, what Arendt put forward was a "communication" model of action, within which the fundamental phenomenon of power is "the formation of a common will in a communication directed to reaching agreement."8 He attributes to Arendt the belief that political institutions rest ultimately on "common convictions,"9 and interprets her general view of politics as "the praxis of those who talk together in order to act in common."'?

Why are these statements, and the interpretation they illustrate, distortions of Arendt's views? Basically, because they substitute talking for acting, consensus for disagreement, and unity for plurality in politics. The most fundamental point is that Arendt did not share Habermas's crucial belief in the possibility of rational consensus on political questions. She did not believe that the "common convictions" he refers to were to be had amongst free people. In her study of totalitarianism she had analyzed as a pathological state the uniformity of ideological belief within mass movements, "I but where free political communities were concerned she quoted with approval an adage from the Federalist Papers: "When men exert their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them."''2

This is not to say that Arendt considered political opinions incorrigible. On the contrary, she stressed that people with different political standpoints can learn from one another, and she applied to political thinking Kant's concept of "judgment," the ability to "think in the place of everybody else."'3 Political thinking, she said, is "representative" in that it involves forming opinions and arriving at judgments by representing to oneself the points of view of others before arriving at conclusions.'4 She stressed particularly that the realism and common sense of judgments rise as they are formed and transformed in the light of other people's opinions. Arendt was very far, then, from the purely subjectivist view that opinions on matters of politics and morals are simply private and incorrigible. While believing, however, that free discussion amongst reasonable individuals is the way to more realistic judgments and better-founded opinions, she did not believe that at the end of that road lay anything remotely resembling universal concur- rence in objective truth, or the authebung of individual opinions into a "common will."

The difference between Arendt and Habermas here may seem small, and it may be argued that insofar as they do differ, Habermas's position



Canovan I HABERMAS AND ARENDIT 109

is simply more coherent than Arendt's. After all, if she is prepared to admit that political opinions can sometimes be shown to be wrong, then she too must be operating with some kind of notion of rational truth in political matters, and she ought, like Habermas, to come out into the open and examine just what is involved in such a claim.

Arendt can certainly be criticized for not pursuing further her discussion of opinion and judgment and trying to work out by what criteria it can be established that one political opinion is an improve- ment on another. These are indeed philosophical questions of great importance. The peculiarity of Habermas's position, however, is that he regards them not just as philosophical questions but as practical problems, concerned not just with how political debates are carried on but with how to settle them. Arendt, by contrast, saw no reason to suppose that we can settle practical political disputes by purely rational means. The difference between them, therefore, while narrow in theory, is crucial for political practice.

Habermas recognized that Arendt did not agree with him, but he dismissed her views as merely old-fashioned:

An antiquated concept of theoretical knowledge . . . keeps Arendt from comprehending the process of reaching agreement about practical questions as rational discourse.

Arguing that "a cognitive foundation can ... be claimed for the power of common convictions," Habermas maintains that Arendt's denial of the possibility of basing politics on a rational consensus is inconsistent with her own view of action. Shaking his head over her old-fashioned cussedness, he concludes,

Hannah Arendt finally places more trust in the venerable figure of the contract than in her own concept of a praxis, which is grounded in the rationality of practical judgement.'5

Now, this is in fact a complete misunderstanding of Arendt. Arendt's concept of "praxis" was not "grounded in the rationality of practical judgement," and Arendt had good reasons for her stress upon "the venerable figure of the contract." The fundamental flaw in Habermas's reading of Arendt is that it is excessively intellectualist. Because Habermas is himself preoccupied with discussion, he misses Arendt's concern with action. Habermas appears to believe that free politics is a matter of citizens first of all talking, and then, after they have all formed a common conviction and will, proceeding to act as one;'6 and he




attributes this view to Arendt. But Arendt thought (as her criticisms of Rousseau's General Will show) that the whole notion of getting individuals to act as one was a dangerous illusion.'7 What she herself stressed was the inescapable plurality of men, not just in the early stages of discussion, but in action.

This is a point on which Arendt is in fact much clearer and less ambiguous than Habermas. She says over and over again that "'men, not Man, inhabit the world"'8-men who are incorrigibly plural. Such men can certainly act together, but not out of anything as stable as a common will based on rational consensus. Instead, human plurality means that action is always a web of intersecting actions with no common goal or definite consummation, always a messy and unpredictable business. This, she points out, is precisely what makes free politics so difficult to achieve, and so fragile when it exists.

Habermas's position is much less clear, and his ambivalence is connected with his attempt to hold theory and practice together in the Marxist tradition. On the one hand, he recognizes that perfect communication is a counterfactual ideal, and that people are not likely to arrive at common convictions in the real world; on the other hand, however, he appears to hold out the prospect of rational agreement on political questions not just as an ultimate utopia but as a matter of direct practical relevance.

He distinguishes in his later work between two levels of nonmanip- ulative communication between people.'9 At the lower level, "communicative action," the participants share a background consensus that they can take for granted, so that their communication can produce an agreement related directly to practice. If the background consensus should be questioned, however, and fundamental matters of principle raised, then the participants can move to the higher level of "discourse." Discourse is concerned purely and simply with establishing the truth in matters of principle, and if it is to take place considerations of immediate practical relevance must be put aside,20 and the participants must be free to pursue the search for truth, however many presuppo- sitions they need to question.

Now, it might be supposed that this notion of rational discourse is simply a limiting ideal. Had we but world enough, and time, no doubt we could go on talking indefinitely, raise all possible aspects of a question, perhaps even settle it-but only on a time scale reaching to infinity. Curiously enough, however, Habermas appears to think of discourse on morals and politics reaching conclusions within a manageable length of



Canovan / HABERMAS AND ARENDT III

time, for he speaks of the possibility of "forming the public will" through discourse, and, as we have seen, he criticizes Arendt for failing to realize that discourse could settle practical questions.

The fact is that, although his notion of rational discourse is most plausible as a counterfactual idealization of potentialities inherent in speech, Habermas cannot avoid treating it as an empirical possibility because this is essential to his radical political stance. In order to determine what kind of society would bejust, and to unmask ideological false consciousness, he has to anticipate the findings of an ideal discourse on political norms. Since he claims that the criterion of a legitimate social order is whether or not people would agree to it under the conditions of ideal discourse,2' he can hardly wait until eternity to find out what the conclusions of that discourse would be.

There is a certain slipperiness about Habermas's "communicative action," an oscillation between theory and practice. He starts with a fairly straightforward conception of practical agreement, the direct formation of a common will in discussion. He recognizes, however, that the participants may have reached a false, ideological consensus,22 or may be unable to agree because some of them raise issues of principle. To meet this problem, he appeals to an ideal limiting condition, the agreement of all participants in fully rational, unblocked discourse. So far, so good: Habermas has solved his problem in theorY; but how is so idealized a condition as a conclusion reached in perfect rational discourse ever to be translated back into practice? This can be done only by a piece of intellectual skulduggery: The outcome of that ideal theoretical discourse must be anticipated for practical purposes. Hence Habermas proposes as a criterion for political practice what people would have decided if they had engaged in rational discourse.23 This of course begs the question twice over, by assuming, first, that there must be some "common will" to be found, and second, that one can know what this would be without having to go through the ideal process of finding it.

The difference between Habermas and Arendt is not a trivial one. Because Habermas's focus is chiefly on the intellectual business of discussion, he misses the significance of Arendt's insistence that free individuals are inescapably plural. For the implication Arendt draws from this is that the public world and its institutions are the only means of holding plural individuals together in freedom. Free people do not share common convictions or have a "common will": Perhaps in some ideal speech situation they might come to do so, but they will certainly




not do so in any conceivable political practice. What they can share is not convictions that are identical inside all their individual minds, but a common world of institutions that is outside them and that all support by their actions. This is why Arendt used what Habermas calls the "antiquated" notion of "'contract," or mutual agreement, to support political institutions. Her point was that although free individuals are too inescapably plural ever to concur spontaneously in their opinions and projects, what they can concur in is their support for a common set of worldly institutions. They can be united, not because they all think alike in the inner realm of their minds, but because outside in the world they all inhabit the same public space, acknowledge its formal rules, and are therefore committed to achieving a working compromise when they differ. For among people who share a common world of institutions, unanimous conviction is not necessary for practical agreement. Where there is a mutual commitment to the continuance of the same public world, differences can be settled through purely political means.24

"II

Does it matter that Habermas misread Arendt? Yes, it does, for two reasons. In the first place, there is some justification for putting the record straight on what Arendt meant. Arendt had important things to say about politics, and many of them are of a kind that political philosophers are likely to miss precisely because, like Habermas, they concentrate too much on what is involved in thinking and talking and not enough on what it is like to act in politics.25

The other reason is that the encounter between the two thinkers illustrates a more general point. Habermas's misreading of Arendt was not just a lapse on his part, but a characteristic example of the way in which original thinking works. One of the most typical ways in which originality expresses itself is through creative misreading-seizing someone else's idea and transforming it unconsciously into something new.26 And while, this creative misreading is a good example of that human plurality and capacity to start things on which Arendt laid so much stress, it must raise doubts about Habermas's theory of undistorted communication. My purpose here is not to make a cheap jibe at the spectacle of an apostle of perfect communrication failing to pay attention to another person's ideas27-after all, the fact that we can recognize and point out Habermas's misinterpretation itself supports his stress on the possibility of rational discourse. The point is this: Habermas's creative



Canovan HABERMAS AND ARENDT 113

misreading of Arendt shows that distorted communication arises not only out of domination and repression, ideology and neurosis28-causes that would not exist in an ideal world-but also out of something that even the most utopian radical could scarcely wish away: human originality.

The ideal of perfect communication demands complete transparency of discourse. Each participant must be intellectually capable of understanding the other; each should be free of fears and prejudices that will render him or her unable to participate fully, and each, rather than manipulating his or her interlocutor, must aim at truth alone. However, there is another condition for fully transparent discourse that is perhaps more elusive: Both speakers must be talking about precisely the same thing, and they must go on talking about that same issue until it is resolved.

Human originality continually frustrates this ideal of discourse. Thinking persons (as Habermas himself pointed out in opposition to Kantianism) are not mere embodiments of the processes of logic: They are distinct individuals engaged in the lifelong business of trying to make sense of their experience. The more vigorous their thought processes, the more individual these tend to be, and the more likely it is that any given issue will take on a distinctive significance for a particular thinker.

As we can see from the case of Habermas and Arendt, original thinkers do not merely differ in their views: They also tend to feed their own thought processes with ideas taken from one another and unconsciously transformed. In the nature of things, this makes it hard for them to communicate fully. The powerfully creative mind that seizes an idea and incorporates it in its own developing intellectual structure does not take kindly to the patient, self-effacing attention that is required to understand another person fully.

Intellectual debates rarely end in consensus, not just because ideological and psychological distortions intervene, but also because the participants are rarely both talking about precisely the same thing. What may appear to be a straightforward issue looks different from each side, because it is tied in to a different set of ideas-just as the ideas about action and plurality that Habermas got from Arendt took on new meanings when they were detached from Arendt's main concerns and integrated into Habermas's.

It is hard, therefore, for vigorous and original thinkers to talk about the same thing even when they are apparently using the same concepts. Worse follows, however, for even if two such people start by talking




about precisely the same thing, this happy state is unlikely to last. Typically, at least one of them gets a new idea or makes a new connection that seems illuminating to him or her, but that deflects his or her attention from the original topic. Two possible outcomes follow. Either the two thinkers talk at cross-purposes-one continuing with the original terms of reference, the other sidetracked by a fascinating new insight-or, more fruitfully, both of them take up the new line of thought and go off on an intellectual adventure that may be very exciting, but that leaves the original problem unresolved.29

No doubt the rational discourse upon which Habermas lays such stress could achieve consensus if the participants could be induced to talk for long enough with their minds strictly focused on exactly the same issue, and if each of them could be prevented from having new ideas that would distract his or her attention. The implication seems to be, however, that an ideal speech situation geared to rational consensus would not only have to exclude domination and repression, but, depressingly, would have to exclude originality as well.

NOTES

1. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 2nd ed. (London: Heine- mann, 1978), p. 176.

2. Jiirgen Habermas, "Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence," Inquiri' 13 (Winter 1970), p. 372. See also idem, "What Is Universal Pragmatics?" in J. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Societ ' (London: Heinemann, 1979); and T. A. McCarthy, "A Theory of Communicative Competence," Philosophj, of the Social Sciences 3 (1973), pp. 135-156.

3. Jurgen Habermas, Theor,' andPractice(London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 150-151. The implications are very clearly spelled out in Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theorl of Jurgen Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1978), pp. 326-327.

4. On "decisionism," see Habermas, Theori, and Practice, p. 266. 5. Jurgen Habermas, "On the German-Jewish Heritage," Telos 44 (Summer 1980) p.

128. Habermas had previously acknowledged Arendt's part in calling his attention to Aristotelian concepts of action; see Habermas, Theor;, and Practice, p. 286.

6. Habermas, "On the German-Jewish Heritage," p. 128. 7. Jiirgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power,"

Social Research 44 (1977), pp. 3-24. Habermas's distortion of Arendt has been pointed out by Gerard P. Heather and Matthew Stolz in the course of their illuminating contrast between Arendt's approach to politics and that of the school of Critical Theory in general; "Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Critical Theory," Journal of Politics 14(1979), pp. 2- 22. By treating Habermas primarily as a member of that school, however, and concentrating particularly on TheorY and Practice, Heather and Stolz pay less attention to



Canovan / IJABERMAS AND ARENDT 115

his later communication theory. This is important, in the first place because Habermas's recent theories appeal to a much wider audience than that sympathetic to Critical Theory in general; and second, because there really are certain resemblances between Habermas's communication theory and Arendt's theory of action, with the result that the crucial differences are subtle and easily missed. The present note therefore endorses Heather and Stolz's main thesis, but supplements it by looking specifically at the relations between Arendt and Habermas's theory of communication.

8. Habermas, "Hannah Arendt," p. 4. 9. Ibid. pp. 5-6, 12, 17, 18, 22-23. 10. Ibid., p. 21. Although Habermas was to a large extent talkingpast Arendt in this

article and missing her point, some of his critical remarks are certainly applicable to and damaging to her theory, notably, his comments on her attitude to social questions; see p. 15.

I 1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins ol Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 457-458, 469-477. It is highly significant that whereas Habermas refers with approval to "that peculiarly forceless force with which insights assert themselves" ("Hannah Arendt," p. 6), Arendt was deeply distrustful of "the tyranny of logicality against which nothing stands but the great capacity of men to start something new" (Totalitarianism, p. 473). A distrust of single-track logicality for its coerciveness and lack of common sense is a frequent theme in her writings. See, for example, Arendt, "Truth and Politics," in P. Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophyv, Politicsand Society, Vol. 3. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 107-1 10; "Understandingand Politics," Partisan Review 20 (1953), pp. 386-387.

12. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber, 1963), p. 227. 13. Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture," in Hannah Arendt, BetWeen Past and

Future (London: Faber, 1961), p. 220. 14. Arendt, "Truth and Politics," p. 115. 15. Habermas, 'Hannah Arendt," pp. 22-24. 16. For a few of Habermas's constant references to "discursive formation of the public

will," see Theory and Practice, pp. 3-4, 37, 255. On intellectualism as the characteristic vice of Critical Theory in general, see Heather and Stolz, "Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Critical Theory," p. 4.

17. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 197-198; On Revolution, pp. 72-73.

18. This statement, with slight variations in phrasing, occurs again and again in Arendt's work, and is perhaps the single most significant motif of her thought. See, for example, Human Condition, p. 9; On Revolution, p. 174; Totalitarianism, p. 476.

19. Habermas explains in "A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests" (Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 369) that the need for this distinction had only recently occurred to him. The various types of speech are most clearly explained in Habermas, 'Universal Pragmatics," especially in Note 2, p. 209.

20. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 369. 21. For example, the problem of achieving democracy is "a question of finding

arrangements which can ground the presumption that the basic institutions of the society and the basic political decisions would meet with the unforced agreement of all those involved, if they could participate, as free and equal, in discursive will-formation"; Habermas, "Legitimation Problems in the Modern State," in Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Societ yv.

22. See, for example, habermas, "Hannah Arendt," pp. 21-22.




23. "How would the members of a social system ... have collectively and bindingly interpreted their needs (and which norms would they have accepted as justified) if they could and would have decided on an organization of social intercourse through discursive will-formation?" J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann), p. 113.

24. For example, voting does not have to be looked upon as a way of finding some kind of General Will that will be the correct answer to the problem, but can be treated simply as a technical means of settling a disputed issue; see Arendt, On Revolution, p. 163.

25. See also Heather and Stolz, "Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Critical Theory," throughout.

26. See M. Leslie, "In Defence of Anachronism," Political Studies 18 (1970), pp. 433- 447.

27. Habermas has come in for considerable criticism on account of his interpretations of other thinkers. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, pp. 351-360; McCarthy, The Critical Theort of Jurgen Hahermas, p. 70.

28. Habermas assumes that deviations from perfect communication "increase in proportion to the degree of repression which characterises the institutional system within a given society"; "Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence," p. 374.

29. One of the criticisms commonly raised against Habermas himself is precisely that he keeps breaking new ground, moving into new theoretical areas long before his critics feel that the previous ones have been properly explored. See, for example, R. Bernstein, The Restructuringof Social and Political TheorY (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. 220.

Margaret Canovan is a Lecturer in Politics at Keele UniversitY, Englandl. Her publications include The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt as wvell as articles on Arendt andl other subjects. Her most recent hook is Populism, and she is current/l working both on populist themes and on Jurther aspects of Arendt's political thought.



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A Case of Distorted Communication: A Note on Habermas and Arendt