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

xli-- ---- -Prefacecontroversies we have carried on since the seventeenth centuryabout the best constitution of the political community. This selfunderstandingis attested to both by a universalistic moral consciousnessand by the liberal design of the constitutional state.Discourse theory attempts to reconstruct this normative self-understandingin a way that resists both scientistic reductions and aestheticassimilations. 6 The three dimensions of cognitive, evaluative,and normative validity that have been differentiated within the selfunderstandingof modernity must not be collapsed. After a centurythat, more than any other, has taught us the horror of existingunreason, the last remains of an essentialist trust in reason havebeen destroyed. Yet modernity, now aware of its contingencies,depends all the more on a procedural reason, that is, on a reasonthat puts itself on trial. The critique of reason is its own work: this ·double meaning, first displayed by Immanuel Kant, is due to theradically anti-Platonic insight that there is neither a higher nor adeeper reality to which we could appealwe who find ourselvesalready situated in our linguistically structured forms of life.Three decades ago I criticized Marx's attempt to transpose theHegelian philosophy of right into a materialist philosophy ofhistory:With his critique of ideology applied to the bourgeois constitutional stateand with his sociological dissolution of the theoretical basis for naturalrights, Marx so enduringly discredited ... both the idea oflegality and theintention of natural law, that the link between natural law and revolutionhas been broken ever since. The parties of an internationalized civil warhave divided this heritage between themselves with fateful clarity: the oneside has taken up the heritage of revolution, the other the ideology ofnatural law.'After the collapse of state socialism and the end of the "global civilwar," the theoretical error of the defeated party is there for all tosee: it mistook the socialist project for the designand violentimplementationof a concrete form of life. If, however, oneconceives "socialism" as the set of necessary conditions for emancipatedforms oflife about which the participants themselves must firstreach an understanding, then one will recognize that the democraticself-organization of a legal community constitutes the normativecore of this project as well. On the other hand, the party that