Habermas’ Criticism And Inheritance Of Weber’s Concept Of Rationality

Enlightenment is an important watershed in the modern times of humans. After Enlightenment, the human started by the "pro-modern society" into the "modern society". In modern society, great changes have taken place in the way of life, values and thinking logics which are more modern. Human beings seem to go on in the broad road of the freedom, equality and individual liberation. But after the French Revolution, the "eternal rationality" and "the world based upon this eternity ", which the Enlightenment thinkers praised, were questioned. In the face of western rationalism crisis and the rise of irrationalism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the representative, Max Weber put forward the concept in the sphere of sociology. Through his analysis on the western social and rational process, he pointed out that in the process of western social development, the instrumental rationality expanded ceaselessly. In fact it has become the main dominant spirit in modern society. Therefore, Weber described the rational results of modern society with "the loss of freedom and meaning" and at the end he made a kind of pessimism to explain the cause of the modern enlightenment of future. Even so, but Weber’s theory still provides a standard and scale for later scholars of social critique of modernity. The critical theory of instrumental rationality of the early Frankfurt School was deeply influenced by Weber’s theory of rationality. As Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno also used rationality to explain the enlightenment and modernity, and then critiqued the western modern society. However, Horkheimer and Adorno regarded rationality narrowly as the rule of instrumental rationality in the modern society. As a result, the early Frankfurt school also explained modernity future with a pessimistic attitude. Their task was to criticized and exposed the disadvantages of modernity. They had no hope of the future of the modernity. Habermas’ thought starts from the modern reflection of the early Frankfurt school. Habermas interpreted the concept of rationality from a broader perspective in his social critique theory. Rationality mainly is not the rationality of expression, but the rationality of behavior, which is related to feasibility and effectiveness of action. It is not only a rational foundation of strategy action, but also a foundation of communicative action which is committed to rationally found the social relationship in accordance with the value goal. Therefore, this concept will not only show the process of construction of the social system during the instrumental rationality, more important is the rational construction of lifeworld with communicative rationality which is based on language and intersubjectivity. Thus, the concept of rationality and the rational theory of Habermas put the rational process of modern society in double approach restricts mutually, in order to achieve the harmonious progress of science and morality, and in order to guarantee that the freedom and liberation of rational enlightenment can be realized. Diagnosis of modern society on this horizon, modernity is an unfinished project. The reconstruction of modernity is the task of critical theory. It will complete the ideals of enlightenment.