Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

322Chapter 7To begin with, we must clarify in what sense society can become"independent" or "reified." This diagnosis obviously does not referto that trivial resistance offered by stubborn everyday problems andby deficits in our attempts to resolve them. After all, the politicalsystem is especially designed to cope with these. From the participantperspective, the normal moments of inertia are perceived asdifferences between norm and reality, gaps that challenge us todeal with practical questions in the first place. Nor may we contrastan independent society-become-second-nature with the fact thatassociated citizens must adopt the demanding communicativepresuppositions of discourse in their exercise of civic autonomy.We would misunderstand the discursive character of public opinion-and will-formation if we thought we could hypostatize thenormative con tent of general presuppositions of rational discourseinto an ideal model of purely communicative social relations. 52In everyday life, the mutual understanding between communicativelyacting subjects is measured against validity claims thatagainstthe massive background of an intersubjectively sharedlifeworld-call for the taking of yes/no positions. Such claims areopen to criticism and contain, together with the risk of dissent, thepossibility of discursive vindication as well. In this sense, communicativeaction refers to a process of argumentation in which thosetaking part justify their validity claims before an ideally expandedaudience. Participants in argumentation proceed on the idealizingassumption of a communication community without limits insocial space and historical time. Moreover, as Karl-Otto Apel hasformulated it, such participants must presuppose the possibility ofan ideal community "within" their real social situation: "Anyonewho engages in argument always already presupposes two things:first, a real communication community whose member he hashimself become through a process of socialization, and second, anideal communication community that would in principle be capableof adequately understanding the meaning of his argumentsand judging their truth in a definitive manner."53 Admittedly, thisformulation could mislead one into thinking the "ideal communicationcommunity" has the status of an ideal rooted in the universalpresuppositions of argumentation and able to be approximatelyrealized. Even the equivalent concept of the "ideal speech situa-