The Value Of Public Reason

"Publicity" is one of the essential categories in Habermas' theory. In fact, this concept has already been posed in his first formal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1961); and what's more, it can also be regarded as the key word which guides Habermas' research in practical philosophy. According to the importance of "publicity", it is impossible for us to overlook it.From The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1961) to Between Facts and Norms (1992), Habermas keeps on exploring the issues of publicity. There are three parts included in this research: the first is the analysis of the category "publicity"; the second is about the relationship between public sphere and the publicity, and also about the value of "publicity"; the last is the historical and philosophical analysis of the historical patterns and changes of "publicity". Among all these three parts, the investigation of the publicity's changes from its rise to decline and then to reconstruction is the core part of Habermas' publicity theory.Through the etymological and historical analysis, Habermas provides us with the formal description of the category "publicity". Generally speaking, he defines "publicity" in the following three aspects: (1) public sphere's openness to all the citizens, (2) people's criticism of the public power and public affairs in public sphere, and (3) a kind of consensus which is reached through rational deliberation under the principles of freedom, democracy and justice, and can make the independent participants take un-coercive collective action. Under this criterion of "publicity", Habermas points out: though ancient Greece already provided citizens with public space, yet it prevented so many people from participation, which made this publicity more in name than in reality; in the feudal society, the most adequate publicity was the display of the illustrious privacy; only in the non-monopoly Capitalist society, the public sphere in the modern sense came into being, out of which the publicity was born.There are three characteristics of the publicity: open, critical and rational. These characteristics make publicity a main political appeal and a kind of political norm with special value. Publicity guides the values of public sphere. In matter of fact, the values of public sphere such as to guard the private value of lifeworld, to examine and criticize the legitimacy of the public power, and accordingly to build a democratic, open and just society are expounded and fixed in the real world through the "publicity".