Knowledge and Human Interests

Summary

Habermas argues that the sciences depend on ideological assumptions, and that enlightenment reason has become an instrument of domination. Influenced by both Kantianism and Marxism, Habermas gives an account of the development of the modern natural and human sciences, concluding, on the basis of his inquiry into the social, historical, and epistemological conditions that made them possible, that the natural sciences depend upon the interest in technical control inherent in manual labor. The interaction and communication between human beings makes possible the historical and hermeneutic disciplines.

The hermeneutic disciplines are techniques of understanding, and include branches of the humanities such as history, social anthropology, biography and philology. According to Habermas, psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic rather than a scientific theory of the mind. Habermas finds Sigmund Freud guilty of "scientistic self-misunderstanding" in thinking that his work is a contribution to science. In his view, psychoanalysis, unlike science, does not aspire to causal knowledge. Instead of attempting to explain human behavior in terms of general causal laws, it aims to dissolve the causal nexus of the natural world: an analytic cure destroys the causal tie between a repression and its neurotic symptom, and thereby rescues the patient from the causal regime of nature.

In the last twelve pages of the book, Habermas provides a critique of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Scholarly reception

Philosopher Jeffrey Abramson compares Knowledge and Human Interests to Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955), Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959), Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and Paul Ricœur's Freud and Philosophy (1965), arguing that they jointly placed Freud at the center of moral and philosophical inquiry.

In a 1974 appendix to Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (first published 1950), philosopher Walter Kaufmann criticized Habermas for poor scholarship in his treatment of Nietzsche, noting that he relied on the inadequate edition of Nietzsche's works prepared by Karl Schlechta. Habermas's discussion of the scientific status of psychoanalysis has been criticized by philosopher Adolf Grünbaum in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984). Grünbaum argues that Habermas misunderstands psychoanalysis and is ignorant of science and its actual practices. Historian Paul Robinson finds Habermas's thinking about the nature of analytic cures difficult to grasp. Philosopher Jonathan Lear criticizes Habermas's work, blaming it, along with Ricœur's Freud and Philosophy, for convincing some psychoanalysts that reasons cannot be causes, a view Lear considers part of a mistaken philosophical tradition.