The Historical Genesis of the Gadamer/Habermas Controversy

Considering the sizable volume of secondary literature on the Gadamer-Habermas debate that has accumulated over the past decade, it may appear to many that little can be added to it in the way of illuminating commentary that has not already been said. This opinion, nevertheless, is disputed by the persistance of the debate itself, which v/as vigorously renewed in a Canadian symposium (1979). Moreover, it would appear from perusing Habermas' recent tome, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981), that the issues debated in the controversy at least continue to be of vital interest to him. My intention, however, is not to delve into these new materials in order to produce yet another commentary. Nor shall I undertake a survey of the secondary literature with the aim of assessing the controversy itself. I propose instead to trace the controversy back to its historical roots in a series of philosophical and sociological debates that throw into relief the neo-Kantian and, above all, the neo-Hegelian motifs that reoccur in the philosophies of the two principals. The earliest commentaries on the controversy generally underscore the differences between Habermas and Gadamer. Ricoeur's essay, "Ethics and Culture" (1973) is typical in this regard.* Though emphasizing the complementarity of Habermas' and Gadamer's views, he was mostly concerned to portray the former as defending a distanciating, explanatory social methodology and the latter as defending a participatory, hermeneutic one. Along with August Wellmer, Ricceur saw the debate as principally a methodological dispute emanating from antithetical attitudes toward tradition and authority. According to Wellmer, Gadamer's hermeneutics seeks to rehabilitate tradition, prejudice and authority in a way that reacts against the critical, emancipatory legacy of the Enlightenment appropriated by Habermas in his proposal for a scientifically grounded ideology critique. Subtler comparisons of the two disputants were proffered by Dieter Misgeld and Theodore Kisiel, who attributed their disagreement to a trenchant asymmetry in levels of discourse.* On Misgeld's reading of the controversy, Gadamer's position advances an on-