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

323Deliberative Politicstion," though less open to misunderstanding, tempts one to improperlyhypostatize the system of validity claims on which speechis based. The counterfactual presuppositions assumed by participantsin argumentation indeed open up a perspective allowingthem to go beyond local practices of justification and to transcendthe provinciality of their spatiotemporal contexts that are inescapablein action and experience. This perspective thus enables themto do justice to the meaning of context-transcending validity claims.But with context-transcending validity claims, they are not themselvestransported in to the beyond of an ideal realm of noumenalbeings. In contrast to the projection of ideals, in the light of whichwe can identify deviations, "the idealizing presuppositions we alwaysalready have to adopt whenever we want to reach mutual understandingdo not involve any kind of correspondence or comparisonbetween idea and reality."54On the other hand, it is legitimate to use such a projection for athought experiment.55 The essentialist misunderstanding is replacedby a methodological fiction in order to obtain a foil againstwhich the substratum of unavoidable societal complexity becomesvisible. In this harmless sense, the ideal communication communitypresents itself as a model of "pure" communicative sociation.In this community, the only available mechanism of self-organizationis the instrument of discursive opinion and will-formation, andby using such means the community is supposed to be able to settleall conflicts without violence. The community even solves the"stubborn" problems of societal integration communicatively, inthe final analysis through rational discourse-yet without the aid ofpolitics and law."6 This thought experiment must also not bemisunderstood. It refers to concrete societies that are situated inspace and time and already differentiated. Hence it does notdetach discursive processes of reaching understanding from thebases of communicative action but reckons on their being situatedin lifeworld contexts. In short, it does not abstract from the"finitude" of communicative social relations. Thus the conditionsthat enable communicative sociation must not be mistaken forcontingently imposed constraints. In this way, we avoid the individ u­alistic fallacy, according to which one experiences the effects ofothers simply as limits on one's individual freedom. Instead, the