In elaborating his theory of communicative action, Habermas distinguishes the scope of rational agreement available to theoretical and practical discourse, on the one hand, from that available to aesthetic criticism, on the other. In doing so, he distinguishes moral norms from cultural values and questions of justice from questions of the good life. In this essay, I want to examine the grounds Habermas finds for this distinction and explore the conception of communicative reason on which it rests.

COMMUNICATIVELY ACHIEVED AGREEMENT

The general question with which Habermas’s account of communicative rationality begins might be reconstructed as the question of how language has the ability to coordinate action in a consensual or cooperative way as opposed to a forced or manipulated one. In other words, how does the employment of language in contexts of interaction produce mutual agreement on a course of action, a fact in the world, an aesthetic evaluation, or an expression of intention, desire, need or the like? The presumption here is that there is a difference between consensual agreement and simple compliance and Habermas grounds this presumption in a reconstruction of the pretheoretical knowledge of competent speakers and actors.