interpreted as sedimentations of interlocutions that can be validated with a
view to agreement, but which have been validated in the past. However, this
validation that persists into the present poses a problem. There is nothing to
stipulate that the conditions of validation are stable, unaffected by time and
history, and that set phrases elicit a rational reaction from the addressee as
they did (if they did) originally. Proverbs and clichés are not particularly
rational ways of achieving agreement with interlocutors; they appeal to an
uncritical respect for tradition and linguistic custom – its prejudices. Tradition
does not equal reason. This explanation of linguistic ready-made thinking
which bears within it dead, sedimented language (just as we speak of dead
metaphors) is about as convincing as the explanation of the current social
order by a social contract in a distant mythical past, to which I am assured
that I am already committed, even though I never signed it. For my situation
with respect to language pretty much resembles my situation with respect to
the social contract: in acceding to speech, I enter into a world of significations
and speech acts that are not all of them rational, which are imposed on
speakers, and against which they must exercise their critical power (philosophy
is the name for this critique).
It therefore emerges that, in Habermas, agreement is a myth, that his
philosophy of language is first philosophy in that it is the expression of a
myth of origins, a mythical starting-point from which he reconstructs not
only language as a human practice but the whole of society (in this, Habermas
is indeed the inheritor of the Frankfurt school and, through it, of Marx and
Weber). We shall not criticise him for having a mythical starting-point; all
philosophers need one. But thisstarting-point has unfortunate consequences.
It has the disadvantage of naturalising a myth. What Habermas claims
to describe is the structure of interlocution. Even if his recourse to the
transcendental is said to be ‘weak’, since interlocution is a given of phenomena,
the very fact of such recourse imparts to his description of phenomena the
form of a description of inescapable conditions of possibility – a structureof
interlocution. This explains Habermas’s central argument, which is as terroristic
as Chomsky’s (the impossibility of any explanation other than innatism): that
the priority of agreement cannot be challenged, for the very fact of challenging
it presupposes at least the possibility of agreement and aims at it in reality.
Any attempt to make agonthe foundation of interlocution therefore ends up
in irrationalism. This argument must be considered calmly: it naturalises a
myth of origins which, on the contrary, is in need of historicisation, and is
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 55