Philosophical Review

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Knowledge and Human Interests by Jurgen Habermas and Jeremy
Shapiro
Review by: Richard W. Miller
Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Apr., 1975), pp. 261-266
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183973
Accessed: 06-03-2018 10:40 UTC

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 BOOK REVIEWS

Murphey's view of truth. In a discussion of what data have survived,

he even writes, "A factual hypothesis, if true, is confirmed by the data"
(p. 96). Unfortunately, this is not true of many historical hypotheses.

JANE ENGLISH

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

KNO WLEDGE AND HUMAN INTERESTS. By JURGEN HABERMAS.

Translated by Jeremy Shapiro. Boston, Beacon Press, I972. Pp. Vii,
356. $7.50.

Knowledge and Human Interests is one of the most widely read philos-
ophy books published in the- last ten years, though in this country it
audience has been largely confined to social scientists. In his book,
Habermas seeks to identify certain contexts of human interests which,
between them, govern all processes of inquiry. He derives from his
analysis conclusions which, if true, have fundamental consequences
for epistemology, ontology, and social theory. Given the suggestiveness
and ambitiousness of his work, Habermas' wide influence is not
surprising. In this review I shall sketch his main ideas and describe
some questions and doubts to which they give rise.
First, a word is necessary about Habermas' method of exposition.
He develops his views in the course of a largely chronological inves-
tigation of several major intellectual figures, Kant, Fichte, Hegel,
Marx, Comte, Mach, Peirce, Dilthey, and Freud. Much of the text is
taken up with interpretations which are convincing but are not new or
controversial. The more novel interpretations are not always supported
in detail, but are in any case connected with relevant passages by the
authors in question. But in the remaining space, where Habermas,
speaking for himself, presents controversial theories, these views are
explained and supported in an extremely sketchy way. As a result,
Habermas' investigations are at once detailed and casual, and my
sketch of his substantive philosophical ideas is necessarily vague.
Habermas describes three "knowledge-constitutive interests" which
are said to govern all forms of inquiry. In particular, all fundamental
procedures of scientific inquiry-for example, the experimental method
in the natural sciences and the most basic principles of interpretation
followed by historians-develop out of the pursuit of such interests and
are adhered to because they continue to serve them. The first knowl-
edge-constitutive interest Habermas examines is the interest in

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 BOOK REVIEWS

possible technical control. In Habermas' scheme, it governs the

purposive activities in which people seek to master nature, and are
guided in their efforts by collective past experiences of attempted
mastery. Natural science, characterized by the experimental method,
is an especially well-developed example of such "purposive-rational
activity." People in societies also have an interest in mutual under-
standing and in the maintenance of social unity by noncoercive means.
This interest governs both everyday efforts to understand one another
and the "cultural-hermeneutic sciences"-for example, history and
philology. Finally, there is an interest whose goal is variously described
as "emancipation," "enlightenment," and "autonomy and responsi-
bility" (the translator's rendering of "Muendigkeit"). This interest
governs the activity of self-understanding in the face of mechanisms of
self-deception, an activity which Habermas calls "reflection."
Reflection, in turn, is the process which is rigorously developed in what
Habermas calls "the critical sciences," comprising psychoanalysis
and the most important parts (for Habermas) of social theory and
philosophy. The few, fragmentary remarks in the book on the
"systematic cultural sciences"-for example, economics and political
science-suggest that these sciences are to be seen as controlled by all
three interests, and the general procedures to which all three give rise.
This over-all scheme for classifying interests relevant to knowledge
seems potentially useful for epistemology. But it raises a number of
questions and doubts, some of which receive little or no discussion in
this book. There is little explanation of how far removed "technical
control" can be from technological manipulation in a narrow sense
(a lack whose consequences we shall soon examine). Habermas has
very little to say in support of the claim that no interests outside of
his favored three have an equally important connection with
knowledge. He nowhere defends his association of historical inquiry
with the interest in social cohesion, although a number of radical
historians (Marx, for example) do not obviously fit this mold. And he
does not explain how enlightenment is to be distinguished from the
mere feeling of enlightenment, in the critical sciences.
For Habermas, the knowledge-constitutive interests do not simply
motivate and sustain processes of scientific inquiry. "The meaning of
validity" in any science is "established" and "determined" by the
associated interest (see pp. I33, I95). Just what "meaning" and
"validity" mean, here, is a question that Habermas never explicitly
considers. But it is clear from the text that Habermas has at least
four extremely fundamental claims in mind.

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 BOOK REVIEWS

To begin with, Habermas feels that all knowledge-and, indeed,

all belief-not only has, but could not conceivably lack, an ultimate
social origin in the pursuit of the interests he describes. The notion of
knowledge or belief totally removed from these interests is held to be
unintelligible. Many readers will find this idea attractive. And merely
by provoking discussion of it, Habermas' book will have served a
useful function. For the idea of an intrinsic, conceptual tie between
knowledge and interests has been, on the whole, neglected in recent
epistemology. However, those who are attracted to Habermas' view
will not be better equipped to defend it as a result of reading this book.
His remarks in support of his claim are largely confined to descriptions
of the kinds of interests that are tied to the various realms of knowledge
and belief. And his classifications, even if valid, are not apt to win over
a philosopher who is initially inclined to think he can conceive of
knowledge and belief divorced from the pursuit of any interest (beyond
a ''pure interest" in truth).
A second claim of Habermas' concerns the basis for regarding
results of inquiry as valid. He believes that the most fundamental
procedures of scientific inquiry (for example, "the experimental
method") can be shown to be valid only by being shown to be
necessary to the pursuit of the relevant knowledge-constitutive interests.
His arguments against more direct sorts of justification are largely
familiar, generally depending on a charge that an alleged justification
is too question-begging to be any justification at all. His main concern
is to develop interest-oriented alternatives. There is a serious gap in
Habermas' discussion here, if I understand correctly his goal. His
"justifications" of fundamental procedures of inquiry lend at least
some support to the claim that behavior governed by interests such
as he describes must, by its very nature, be guided by the procedures
he associates with those interests. Habermas, for example, cites and
elaborates arguments of Peirce's to the effect that the concept of
purposive behavior includes the concept of guidance by at least some
primitive version of the basic forms of scientific inference. But if
establishing the validity of fundamental procedures of inquiry involves
answering traditional philosophical doubts (and this is Habermas'
apparent intention), his arguments seem inadequate as they stand. For
traditional skepticism concedes that we may be unable to avoid
employing certain fundamental procedures in pursuing our interests
but raises an allegedly separate question concerning the validity of
these procedures. It is felt, for example, that we may be in no position
to accept inductive inference as generally reliable, even if, as beings

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 BOOK REVIEWS

trying to master nature, we necessarily rely on it. In general, one

wishes Habermas shared Peirce's sensitivity to the peculiar status of
"philosophical doubt."
A third theme in Habermas' examination of the interest-laden
"meaning of validity" is the rejection of objectivismm," the view
that a "self-subsistent world of facts structured in a law-like way"
(p. 69) exists, independent of human interests. This anti-objectivist
ontology is put forward too often and too explicitly for it to be dismissed
as a loose statement of the claims described above concerning knowl-
edge and justification. On the other hand, Habermas moves so
casually from the latter claims to the former one as to suggest that he
is guided by a non sequitur somewhat like Berkeley's argument for
identifying being and being perceived. Habermas seems to feel that if
we cannot conceive of knowledge or belief divorced from interest
and if our procedures of investigation are legitimate only in their
contexts of interests, then the reality we investigate and describe
must itself be one that could not exist if human interests did not.
In his analysis of knowledge and interests, Habermas also asserts
the fundamental distinctiveness of the interests governing the natural,
the cultural-hermeneutic, and the critical sciences, respectively. His
most important and extensive discussions in this regard concern his
belief that inquiry in the cultural-hermeneutic and critical sciences
is not (or should not) be guided by an interest in technical control.
Scientistic philosophers who claim to the contrary misunderstand
"the meaning of validity" in history, psychoanalysis, and so forth.
Habermas' views on the separateness of natural-scientific inquiry
seem one-sided and exaggerated. Given the existence of such natural
sciences as astronomy and such scientific theories as Darwinian
evolution, technical control, seen as the fundamental goal of all
natural science, must be understood in an extremely broad sense. But
if the concept of technical control is adequately broadened, it appears
to include the creation of hypotheses which explain new data and as yet
undiscovered phenomena, a goal which is quite as characteristic of
historians as of physicists.
In the face of such difficulties, Habermas' effort to create an
unbridgeable gap between natural science and other kinds of science
increasingly relies on an unintentional parody of the natural sciences
in which the question of whether given particular events confirm or
disconfirm given natural-scientific theories is regarded as essentially
unproblematic. This alleged contrast with the cultural-hermeneutic
and critical sciences will come as a surprise to the vast majority of

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 BOOK REVIEWS

natural scientists, who spend a large part of their lives in

over just such questions of applicability.
Of course, if Habermas is wrong to isolate totally the natural sciences,
he may still be right to reject the notion that the natural sciences
provide an adequate model of how any science should be pursued. To
the extent that he is elaborating the latter claim, his remarks are often
plausible and suggestive. His idea that the social sciences are often
(and properly) guided by interests that are not characteristic of
natural science may provide a more valid distinction between the
different realms than previous methods of demarcation. And Habermas
has important things to say about the practical significance of this
question of the diversity of interests. He emphasizes that the notion of
the social scientist as a kind of physicist of the social realm can encourage
social scientists in self-deception as to the interests that actually
govern their work, and in the rejection of important work as unscientific.
In addition to traditional questions of epistemology and ontology,
Habermas is often concerned with topics that ordinarily are dealt
with in the social sciences and in psychology. I shall conclude by
examining one such aspect of Habermas' many-faceted work, the
theory of the sources of social oppression and social change that he
develops out of a reinterpretation of the nature of psychoanalysis.
(The discussion of Freud is too complex and specialized to be considered
in this brief review.)
According to Habermas, the ultimate social source of deprivation
is the existence of institutions through which people are deceived as to
their own real needs and real nature, in a kind of normal neurosis.
While these institutions (for example, religious institutions) initially
serve the useful purpose of rendering inactive desires that cannot be
satisfied given the economic resources available, they endure after they
have outlived their usefulness. Habermas seems to believe that the
main source of radical change is the unmasking of the role of such
institutionalized self-delusions, a process which is said to return the
desires they distort and ritualize to a conscious and active role in
human life.
Habermas' book contains virtually no factual argument for this
theory. There are honorable excuses for this lack, given the scope of the
book and previous, more concrete studies by Habermas and other
members of the so-called "Frankfurt School." But, what is less
excusable, there are a great number of general questions and doubts to
which this theory gives rise that do not receive even a preliminary
discussion. For example: do institutions of collective self-delusion

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endure spontaneously when they do not serve the general interests of

society? Institutions embodying the idea that kings and nobles (or
white people) are the appointed rulers of mankind certainly seem to
have endured too long for self-sustained existence to be plausible. But
if self-delusive institutions do not endure spontaneously, why are
these institutions, rather than the forces that maintain them, the
fundamental causes of oppression? Also, doesn't organized physical
coercion play a basic and independent role in the maintenance of
social deprivation? And is the critical analysis of ideology the primary
factor in social change, or is the primary factor the physical struggle
against arrangements that ideology supports? In each case, either
Habermas' answer or the basic rationale for his answer is missing.
I have emphasized questions that Marxists (along with a great
many non-Marxists) would address to Habermas, because he is
widely viewed as a neo-Marxist philosopher. In fact, this label is
extremely misleading. The "historical-materialist" notions that
economic domination is the ultimate cause of social misery and that
radical change cannot primarily depend on the criticism of ideas
were both at the center of Marx's thought from the time he had
distinctively Marxist things to say. Habermas differs from Marx in
both respects-and often in terms which Marx explicitly criticized
as early as i845, in The Holy Family and The German Ideology.
Although this book is under-argued, often implausible, and (on
such crucial topics as "technical control") ill-defined, philosophers in
the many fields it covers will find it worth reading. Habermas has
managed to combine in his theories two attractive ideas that are often
pursued in isolation from one another: the pragmatic notion that
practical interests are not antithetical to the acquisition of knowledge,
but are intrinsic to it, and the anti-reductionist idea that the various
procedures of inquiry are not, at bottom, homogeneous. For all their
defects, Habermas' views are coherent, explicit, and insightful enough
to help in the further development of an epistemology that combines
these tendencies. One can learn from criticizing Habermas and from
reflecting on his historical surveys of the theme of knowledge and
interest in past philosophers. Also (and not least) this is, for better or
worse, an important book. Whether it will simply encourage and
support the investigation of ties between knowledge and interest
or will foster a revival of subjectivism and idealism may prove
important to the development of contemporary social theory.
RICHARD W. MILLER
Cornell University

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