Explaining the motivation for his inquiry in the introduction to Part I of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas wrote: “The philosophical tradition, insofar as it suggests the possibility of a philosophical worldview, has become questionable. Philosophy can no longer refer to the whole of the world, of nature, of history, of society, in the sense of a totalizing knowledge.”12 Contemporary philosophy confronts a “postmetaphysical, post — Hegelian” breakdown of First Philosophy, and has abandoned “all attempts at discovering ultimate foundations.”13 In this cognitively and culturally decentered age, Habermas argues, “interest is directed to the formal conditions of rationality in knowing, in reaching understanding through language and in acting.”
Although it has abandoned “First Philosophy,” the project of developing a theory of argumentation, of “reaching understanding through language,” has roots in the last two centuries. Habermas, in the tradition of critical philosophy, believes that the task of a critique of reason is inescapable in modern society. With Hegel, Habermas believes that the age of modernity “has to create its normativity out of itself.”14 Conscious of itself as a “new age,” open to the future, having “broken with what was hitherto the world,” “modernity sees itself cast back upon itself without any possibility of escape.”15 For Habermas as for Kant, the critique of reason is motivated by modernity’s sceptical threat of uncertainty, and the dogmatic threat of prejudice, threats that represent enslavement, disintegration, and injustice. For Kant, the positive aim of critique was the discovery of laws—of thought, of nature, and of action—that answer the sceptic without lapsing into dogmatism. Though Habermas rejects Kant’s assumption that critique should seek
its foundations in the subjective conditions of possible experience, he accepts Kantian outlines of possible knowledge, in his Piagetian-Toulminian understanding of truth as scientific knowledge, and his baldly Kantian ethical theory (redeveloped via Kohlberg).16
It could be argued that feminism faces a parallel challenge to “create its own normativity out of itself.” As feminists, we find ourselves in a position of radical uncertainty and orientation to the future that could be likened, if only broadly, to Hegel’s “new age.” One expression of this uncertainty might be found in a question raised by Joyce Trebilcot: “Do I contemplate these ideas in feminist consciousness or as I have been taught in patriarchy to do? Do I think the succession of ideas myself or do I follow patriarchal patterns of words drummed into me?”17 One could read Trebilcot’s question as a sceptical question, expressing a need to move outside of the dogmatics of patriarchy. In raising it, she calls into question the nature of theorizing in general, asking whether the activity of theorizing is not intrinsically a patriarchal tool of domination. She suggests that storytelling is a more appropriate (because more truthful and honest) way of creating connections of understanding and purpose between women. Rather than contribute to a general ideology in which the truths of individual women are lost or erased, stories contribute a variety of analyses.
It is revealing that this expression of feminist scepticism is directed against the activity of theorizing itself. Similar sceptical sentiments towards theory are present in much feminist writing, though they do not always target the same concepts or methods. Theory and analysis are also challenged from a postmodern perspective, e. g., by Jane Flax and Susan Bordo.18 Jane Flax discerns in the pursuit of theoretical foundations the privileging of a standpoint that is dishonestly abstract, disembodied, and ahistorical. Susan Bordo adopts a postmodern incredulity towards generalizations and general analytic categories (including the category of gender), on the grounds that generalizations marginalize the voices and experiences of those persons who are different from their authors. Habermas would agree with these objections insofar as the theory criticized by Flax and Bordo does not fulfill his requirements of consensual theory. However, one of his consensual requirements, that a final consensus be universal, has appeared to many of his postmodern critics to be all but indistinguishable from the ill-fated Hegelian absolutism. The attractiveness of Habermas’s recognition of social plurality and its role in knowledge formation is offset by an anticipated end to plurality, in the form of final epistemic justification.
There is no doubt that Trebilcot’s, Bordo’s, and Flax’s criticisms of theory — construction diverge from Habermas’s own conception of critical inquiry. But it is doubtful that these perspectives can be a substantial guide to conducting feminist analysis. On the one hand, Trebilcot’s insight into the importance of women’s truth-telling and analysis of personal life histories is right on the mark. I shall argue below that her insistence upon rooting feminist analysis in women’s stories is essential in conceiving feminist thinking. On the other hand, her objections to theory are self-contradictory: either she admits that systematic analysis (theory) is necessary and expects it to come from the stories themselves, or the nature of analysis or theory is invested with dangers of such diabolical dimensions that any analysis done in the process of storytelling would be implicated as well. Bordo’s and Flax’s reservations in generalizations are well-motivated insofar as they caution against normalizing the dominant and marginalizing the powerless. But generalizations and principles as such are hardly pernicious, and as Christine Pierce argues, their use is necessary in making arguments such as these e. g., “Generalizations tend to marginalize the powerless.”19 More likely, it is what we count as the test of principles and generalizations that needs work. Nonetheless, these authors develop two themes which cannot be ignored in a feminist conception of reason and knowledge: we must seek out and listen to the stories of women, and we must be mindful of difference.
Other feminist challenges have targeted not theory as such, but the traditional philosophical project of the critique of reason. Robin Schott’s book, Cognition and Eros criticizes the notion of the “purity” of reason, exploring the division, created by European philosophy from Plato to Kant, between reason and eros.20 If Kant were to successfully complete this division, she argues, reason itself had to become ascetic. Schott argues that Kant’s distillation of pure reason (both theoretical and practical) is not merely coincidental with his religious and personal asceticism. Rather, an ascetic distance between the reasoning and knowing subject on the one hand and those dimensions of the self and the world that conflict with a sustained “fear of God in the heart” on the other is constitutive of reason and knowledge. Sensual pleasure and pain, for example, do not contribute for Kant either to scientific or to moral knowledge, and the senses which are predominantly occupied with conveying impressions of pain or pleasure (touch, smell, and taste) are therefore inferior to sight as sources of knowledge.21 Schott finds it revealing that Kant should choose to distinguish sense impressions that can contribute to empirical observations from those that cannot by the extent to which the resulting experience is “admixed” or tainted with impressions of pleasure or pain. Here the divergence of Kantian scepticism and feminist scepticism becomes clear: where Kant was sceptical of erotic connection, feminism is sceptical of the denial of erotic connection and the ways in which this denial has structured our most basic conceptual resources.
Does this analysis of Kant’s concept of reason as ascetic carry over to Habermas’s theory of rationality? I believe that it does, insofar as Habermas’s conception of reason still relies so heavily upon the concept of epistemic
justification in developing the concepts of autonomy and community. On the one hand, Habermas defends his consensus theory of reason and knowledge on the ground that the mutuality of understanding is the basis of all fully human social relationships. There is no fully human (i. e., fully rationalized) social relationship, Habermas argues, without mutuality of understanding, on the basis of shared grounds.22 Here again we see the immanent interdependence of his concept of consensus with a concept of community. On the other hand, however, Habermas limits the community of mutual understanding to a justified consensus—the mutuality is a mutuality of shared justifications—and his community is one of agents whose autonomy and mutuality both are constituted by nothing other than justificatory competence. It is in this ultimate reliance on a procedure for epistemic justification as the guarantor of autonomy, community, and knowledge that we can see, once again, the illusions wrought by early modern scepticism. Where Kant once sought and Habermas still seeks to rebuild, in the shape of systematically justified beliefs, the confidence and social bonds of a subject sundered from itself and its community, feminism protests against the premises of this project. We wonder whether critical philosophy does not have it backwards: whether knowledge is not created out of solidarity, rather than the reverse.
Sympathetic readers of Habermas would plausibly object that in drawing parallels to Kant, I have played down the importance of mutuality in Habermas’s account of the possibility of knowledge. Habermas emphasizes that the very ability to perform any kind of speech act, specifically, an illocutionary act, rests upon the speaker’s essentially social ability to position himself or herself as a co-participant in a communicative relationship—to say, “/ address this speech act to you. How do you respond?” The issue lies in how Habermas understands this social ability. For Habermas, this ability is not a simple, basic capacity to enter into relationship; it has an internal structure, which he calls the “validity basis of speech.” The validity basis of speech is the set of rules of justificatory argumentation. It is the mutual recognition of and compliance with these rules, Habermas argues, that secures the possibility of relationship.23 The successful speech act, then, establishes a relationship between the speaker and the hearer only insofar as the epistemic confidence of each requires the justified agreement of the other.
This argument provides the crucial premise for Habermas’s contention that an orientation to rational consensus is present in every speech act. If no relationship is possible without shared recognition of the norms of communication, and the norms of communication are given in the validity basis of speech, then every act of communication must invoke them. It is this argument, then, that claims for the validity basis of speech its alleged “quasi-tran — scendental” status. Many of Habermas’s critics have challenged the universality claimed for the validity basis of speech. Here, I will raise the issue of whether there are universal norms of communication aside, focusing on the claim such norms (if there are any) must be norms of epistemic justification. It is this second, stronger claim rather than the first that ties the act of communication to the notion of an ideal community composed specifically of communicatively competent persons (i. e., persons competent in the procedures of epistemic justification). Specifically, I wish to challenge two premises of this second claim. The first premise is that the ideal of a community held together by shared techniques of justification is an adequate one in articulating the ideals of social association.
Of course, Habermas’s concept of consensus was never intended to embody a substantive vision of societal institutions and associations. Ratheg the ideal of consensus is an ideal of a universal “community” of agreement upon basic epistemic and ethical questions, leaving questions of individual and group identity and association, and specific social institutions, to the domain of local consensus on social and cultural values.24 My complaint may thus seem to miss the point of Habermas’s consensus theory. Nonetheless, the point, which is similar to objections raised by others, bears repeating: The notion of the communication community is maximally thin in content, however committed it may be to justice for all.25 The usual rejoinder to this observation is that, that’s the way it goes when you’re working out general guiding principles: they bear little concrete content, and this is a difficulty that you’ll have to face unless you want to do without them. Rather than protest against the thinness of science and ethical-judicial reasoning as such, I wish to contest their status as the sole fundamental constitutive activities of community, solidarity, and society. It is possible to concede Habermas’s assertion that a distinctly modern rationality has taken shape vis-a-vis questions of truth and justice in theoretical-scientific and ethical-juridical discourse, without granting his view that it constitutes the basis for the entire edifice of socialization, social integration, and enculturation. To concede that competence in the art of justification may be crucial to deciding fundamental issues of truth and justice is not to concede that justification is the foundation of all forms and dimensions of relationship. Mimesis, sympathy, and affection have at least as much claim to this status. Below, I explore the possibility that substantive ideals of solidarity and community can serve as the central constitutive values of feminist reasoning, as truth and justice are the constitutive values of science and philosophical ethics, respectively. To designate a value as a constitutive value of an activity or form of inquiry is to claim that it belongs to the set of characteristic aims of that activity or inquiry; in the absence of that aim the activity would simply not be that activity, as modern science would not be modern science without its aim of constructing a true theory of the universe.
The second questionable premise evokes the precedents of modern philosophy: the assumption that the possibility of intersubjectivity in general must
be grounded in the possibility of accepting and rejecting arguments. Epistemic confidence in a shared objectivity is not the answer for feminism (as it was for Descartes and Kant) to the question of the possibility of intersubjectivity. Indeed, as I shall argue below, feminist critics of reason tend not to regard the possibility of intersubjectivity as a problem at all and protest those aspects of traditional epistemology that do. Feminist epistemology tends to argue that the subject comes to the specialized activity of justifying knowledge claims as an already socially embedded being. In contrast, the abstracted form of social relationship established, according to Habermas, by the successful illocutionary act—a mutuality of shared justifications—entails the inessentiality of any social embeddedness with which every subject might come to the social relationship. It is a form of relationship from which the substantive and “erotic” dimensions are subtracted. The question raised here is whether it is necessary to subtract them in the first place, unless one’s interest is solely in formal or analytic issues.
Rather than rely upon a theory of justification to develop the idea of community, many feminist writers on knowledge start the other way around. Visions of community and solidarity, of friendship, of self located by solidarity, serve to affirm and cultivate the ways in which we are learning how to communicate, to analyze, to self-critically reflect; in other words, to reason and know. Some forms of feminist knowledge building stress the essential continuity of friendship or solidarity and the knowledge at the basis of the feminist movement. There is the communicative knowledge of particular others created in the kind of storytelling that Trebilcot describes, and the knowledge of interactive “world-travelling” of women whose sources of identity are deeply different, described in Maria Lugones’s work.26 From the multifaceted diversity of the particular experiences shared in these acts of communication, there are larger pictures to be drawn. Patterns in the nature of oppression become visible, and our own experiences of enslavement are transformed before our eyes from private cages to cells in a mass detention system. At the same time, we learn that this detention system is not onedimensional, and that it has no single point of origin. The patterns of oppression that emerge into view also reveal norms of affiliation and desire that, while weighing heavily on one woman, embody the conditions of liberation for another. We learn that we need to see the territorial boundaries that we have established among ourselves as women; their nature, their justice or injustice, and the gates that are left open and closed by them. The fabric, weak or strong, of our shared stories and of our careful analysis of our own stories in relation to those of other women, is part of the fabric of our solidarity. In this sense, feminist knowledge is the creation of solidarity-building.
Other feminist writers challenge the assumption, which I have so far left untouched, that the constitutive values of science-as-usual and those of
feminist thinking belong to independent domains of discourse. These writers argue that social ideals are always present in scientific inquiry and theory, and that a feminist science would reflect feminist social goals. Evelyn Fox Keller has employed the comparison between the anxious solipsistic self of early modernism and the communicatively identified self of feminism to articulate a feminist conception of “dynamic” objectivity, illustrating its emergence in the work of several women in science.27 Instead of looking for relations of hierarchy and control within nature and between the observer and nature, Keller argues, dynamic objectivity approaches the natural world as something that tends to behave in ways that are unpredictable from a “master control” perspective. Focusing specifically on some of the human sciences (paleontology, human genetics, and neuroendocrinology), Helen Longino has illuminated the intricate dependence of scientific research programs, and the constitutive values of scientific method, upon shared commitments to particular social and cultural values.28 When those values are patriarchal, she argues, accepted methods of scientific inquiry follow suit, avoiding questions about variables that might threaten assumptions about man as the toolmaker, the harem — collector, and the conqueror. Both Keller’s and Longino’s arguments develop the view that one’s visions of and assumptions about forms of social association are fundamental to one’s vision of inquiry and knowledge, and both urge the adoption of feminist values of relationship in mapping the dimensions of scientific inquiry.
Keller’s and Longino’s arguments can be of help in further refining my characterization of feminist epistemology. My claim is not that an ideal of solidarity replaces that of truth as a “criterion” of knowledge (a claim that would make little sense), but that ideals of community and solidarity figure centrally in articulating the ideal of knowledge, namely truth. In other words, truth is not a value or ideal that is empty of substantive (and specifically, social) content. Again, this reverses Habermas’s conceptual scheme, which relies upon a vision of interpersonal argumentation (truth-seeking) to articulate the ideal community.
In summary, there is some convergence in feminist epistemology with Habermas’s insight that ideals of community are developed in tandem with conceptions of reason and knowledge. Habermas’s argument that the knowledge that belongs to the subject is knowledge only in virtue of that subject’s relation to a community of knowers is consistent with what most feminist writers on knowledge have proposed. However; feminist critics of epistemology have rejected the sceptical issues and anticipated resolutions central to epistemology since Descartes, issues still present in Habermas’s defense of the possibility of science and universal ethical laws against the solipsistic and sceptical threat of relativism.29 Feminist theorists have rejected this project because it presupposes the very isolation of the subject that the project itself
seeks to overcome. But if the alleged isolation and detachment of the knowledge-seeking subject is not a threat countenanced by feminism, then what interest do women have in developing a conception of reason and knowledge at all? Is epistemology to feminism what social science was to Marx—a web of obfuscation, constructed to make the unreal seem real, and the real seem unreal? Perhaps, if the only point to having a theory of knowledge were to overcome the legacy of Cartesian scepticism. However, other options have emerged. In the final section of this paper, I wish to draw upon these insights about the dependence of thought, analysis and knowledge for feminist visions of solidarity, but first, it is necessary to further explore the content of feminist solidarity.