Cognitive Interests and Self-Reflection

Abstract

In his inaugural lecture¹ Habermas presented a programme of a philosophy of emancipation, according to which our knowledge is guided by our interest in emancipation, our interest in intersubjective communication, as well as our interest in technical mastery over nature. Already, at that time, Habermas indicated that a proof of the thesis that our knowledge depends on our interests was not to be given in the form of a systematic argument but rather by way of a historical appraisal of the positivistic and historicist philosophy of science. Accordingly, Knowledge and Human Interests turned out to be a history of philosophy, albeit of a special kind. His excursion through the idealistic (Kant, Hegel) and the materialistic (Marx) theory of knowledge, through the prehistory of positivism (Comte, Mach), pragmatism (Peirce), historicism (Dilthey), psychoanalysis (Freud) and perspectivism (Nietzsche) served as the philosophical and historical framework within which the thesis of the cognitive interests was to be systematically established. This was in effect the systematisation of a theory the aims of which converge in the concept of ‘self-reflection’. Knowledge and Human Interests was an exercise in ‘self-reflection’ in the sense of a theory of knowledge which, while raising the question of human interests, at the same time resurrected the Kantian question concerning the conditions of the possibility of knowledge in general; it was also a ‘self-reflection’ in the sense of a critical theory which, while reflecting upon cognitive interests, was at the same time a reflection on the conditions of the possibility of emancipation from ideologies and power structures.