Communicative Rationality And Ethical Rationality

As China is developing rapidly these years, our politics, economy and culture all entered a period of great changes, and the unbalanced development caused various problems in our society. Of these problems, some already occurred in the western countries in their development, some occurred only in our country, and some occurred in every developing country when they were faced with the conflict between the local culture and the foreign cultures.In the field of culture, we are facing problems cause by the communication and conflict between China and West, or between tradition and modernity. Problems caused by the communication and conflict must be solved.Our scientists have been making great effort in the study on communication between different cultures. They have compared and elucidated the western traditional culture, modern culture and Chinese traditional culture systematically and detailedly and got invaluable achievments. But we seldom see detailed comparison between communicative rationality and ethical rationality. In this very article we will study on these two theories based on the respective existing studies with comparative method that the forthgoers have invented.The theory of "communicative rationality" infers that we should achieve the harmony in our society by obtaining common understanding in communication, while the "ren" theory, especially the "harmony but not sameness", in our Confucianism shows resemblance to it. When Habermas criticized western technical rationality, he affirmed the superiorities of the eastern culture in some special fields. Thus we can know that there should be the possibility for a dialogue between the two theories.In this article, we think that "communicative rationality"and "ethical...