Abstract
The chapter reconstructs the basic agent-based capabilities required for a democratically defined public sphere under conditions of globalization. Making capabilities central is intended to correct a certain overemphasis regarding institutional macro-structures in the discourse on globalization and cosmopolitanism. In the first part, a notion of hermeneutic agency is introduced that avoids a social reduction of agency to power structures, while thoroughly situating agency in a symbolically mediated social context. The symbolic mediation of agency is, in the second part, taken as a ground of potentiality for reflexive capabilities that, once actualized and enacted, allow for a normatively satisfying process of public deliberation. The aim of the analysis is to relate a normative model of value orientation to the linguistically grounded empirical resources of social agents. The core argument lays out as basic capabilities (a) to be able to normatively orient oneself at contextually defined yet universally open post-conventional commitments, (b) to be able to engage in an interpretive and dialogical perspective-taking vis-à-vis differently situated agents and backgrounds and (c) to be able to critically distance oneself from one’s taken-for-granted assumptions and background structures via a power-alert social reflexivity.
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Notes
- 1.
The crucial question is thus what kind of capabilities are required in order to allow for the rational intersubjective assessment and interpretation of the value orientations articulated in the dialogue by differently positioned speakers. Clearly we have to distinguish between moral and legal discourses interested in the establishment of overarching universal values and norms, discourses that aim at specifying the conditions of applying these values and norms to specific contexts and discourses (and which are more locally aimed at the articulation of specific value- and reality conceptions). Despite these important differences, in what follows I suggest that three capabilities are necessary presuppositions of any intercultural dialogue.
- 2.
Accordingly, normative judgments have always to take the concrete historical and cultural situations into account. For example, the argument concerning the uniqueness of the Holocaust is progressive and morally important in a German context in which the comparison to other genocides was meant to weaken a basic sense of moral responsibility toward this event. However, the same argument in the US or British context can have an opposite effect, inasmuch as it may function to diminish the moral responsibility toward the crimes of slavery and colonialism. The hermeneutic model of an agent’s self-commitment to values and norms thus includes, besides the acceptance of a lack of any transcendental grounding, the need to situate all normative claims adequately in the relevant contexts.
- 3.
Consensual attitudes vis-à-vis existing forms of meaning and norms might well hide underlying structures of domination; they might be acceptable to all parties and nonetheless deeply affected by power. The bishop and the nun might share their commitment to a Christian order of things involving a gender-based distribution of roles; similarly, the pimp and the prostitute might both endorse a hedonistic lifestyle, accepting as it were a quite different distributions of tasks within its limits; the white master and the African slave might have ‘accepted’ a certain structuration of tasks, of places in the world, as do workers as much as capitalists in an exploitative, dehumanizing and alienating system of labor.
- 4.
A previous version of this chapter appeared under the title ‘Constructing a Cosmopolitan Public Sphere: Hermeneutic Capabilities and Universal Values’, in European Journal of Social Theory, ed. Gerard Delanty/Peter Wagner, SAGE Publishers, pp. 297–320.
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Kögler, HH. (2018). The Hermeneutic Foundations of a Cosmopolitan Public Sphere. In: Giri, A. (eds) Beyond Cosmopolitanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5376-4_18
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