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Political Theory
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Communicating Depth

Habermas and Merleau-Ponty on Language and Praxis

Keith Haysom

University of Ottawa and Carleton University Ottawa, Canada

This essay takes as its task the critical comparison of two thinkers who are rarely matched or studied in tandem: Jürgen Habermas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It stages a (largely) speculative dialogue between the two thinkers, considering not only the points of convergence but their likely objections to each other’s accounts of communication and language. I will argue that Merleau-Ponty, whose own concerns significantly overlap with Habermas’s, while simultaneously pulling in a different direction, serves as a useful counter-point to Habermas. This is so because Merleau-Ponty offers us an intersubjectivist account of praxis, from which can be extrapolated an ethics of communicative engagement between self, other, and world. Such a phenomenological and/or existential rereading of the central Habermasian problematic not only compensates for the notorious abstraction of Discourse Ethics, but better underscores possibilities for social transformation inherent in intersubjectivity and the lifeworld than are acknowledged by Habermas.

Key Words: Habermas • Merleau-Ponty • communication • language • intersubjectivity

This version was published on October 1, 2009

Political Theory, Vol. 37, No. 5, 649-675 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0090591709340136
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