Study On Habermas’s Critical Hermeneutics

When social critical theory of the Frankfurt School were facing the legitimacy dilemma,Habermas,a German neo-Marxist philosoper,found out that it’s urgent to fomulate the normative basis for critical theory.So on,critical hermeneutics came into being.Based on the Marxist tradition of critical reflection,Habermas further promoted the philosophical hermeneutics by digesting and transforming the basic viewpoints,and developed his own critical hermeneutics.In this case,it’s a neo-Marxist type of hermeneutics that focused on ideological criticism and the pursuit of freedom and liberation.Habermas’ s originality lies in the ingenious integration of "critical reflection" and "communication understanding",and constructs critical hermeneutics from three levels of epistemology,methodology and practice.On the dimension of epistemic understanding,critical hermeneutics is concerned with critical self-understanding in the field of social sciences.Habermas sees from Marx’s thought that thorough cognitive criticism should be placed in the social realm.No cognition can reflect on itself out of thin air,but must be related to human rational interest.Liberated rational interest leads to critical social cognition,which laid the foundation for critical hermeneutics understanding theory.In the dimension of critical method,in the face of the cross-border encroachment of positivist methodology from the field of natural science to the field of spiritual science,critical hermeneutics shoulders the mission of methodological construction.Based on the realistic concern of people’s "distorted communication" caused by the alienation of capitalist society,Habermas hopes to construct a social analysis method that can successfully promote self-reflection and the formation of reflective consciousness.Therefore,critical hermeneutics has turned its attention to Marxist ideological criticism and Freudian psychoanalysis,two typical examples in the field of social sciences.Realistic analysis of distorted communication is not Habermas’ ultimate goal,but the restoration of rationalized human social interaction.The liberating purpose of critical hermeneutics points to the pursuit of democratic liberation of free communication and equal dialogue.The initial attempt of critical hermeneutics to find a normative basis for critical social theory was able to be integrated into the theory of communicative behavior.It can be said that critical hermeneutics is the theoretical integration made by Habermas in the early academic period,paving the way for the construction of the communicative behavior system.