In his Habermas and Theology , Nick Adams sums up Habermas’s project as an effort to answer this question: “how can there be moral debate between members of different traditions?” Habermas’s answer, Adamss says, is “simple in conception”: “Habermas argues that one has to identify rules for argumentation that transcend tradition. Without such rules, there can be only the clash of competing views, or a succession of positions that do not engage with each other. The difficulty for Habermas is specifying those rules, and showing that they are binding on all participants in debate.”

This puts him in conflict with philosophical hermeneutics, with which he has a great deal of sympathy.

He agrees with Gadamer’s critique of scientism, and he also agrees with Gadamer that human beings are always operating in a tradition. But Habermas doesn’t like the way Gadamer’s notion of tradition and language works. He says, as Gadamer does, that reflection opens a space of freedom from a particular tradition; we can conceive of our tradition as tradition, and thus gain some critical distance. Habermas retains an Enlightenment commitment to the absoluteness of reason, and argues that this creates a “distance” from tradition. He agrees with Gadamer that reason is always operating with a tradition, but thinks that Gadamer doesn’t adequately distinguish the difference between “being engaged while reflecting on that engagement, and simply being unreflectively engaged.”

In large measure, this difference is a result of Habermas’s concern about the loosening hold that tradition holds on people in the modern world. Gadamer’s tradition-bound thinkers seem rather old-fashioned to Habermas. As Adams says, “The question, for Habermas, is thus how one orients oneself to a tradition once one becomes conscious of the vulnerability of its binding character.”

Part of what is at stake too is the issue of authority. Gadamer links authority with knowledge. Habermas, by contrast, “has learned (he does not say from whom) that children internalise authority through patterns of reward and punishment and through identification with role models. Gadamer gives a good account of the handing down of tradition, but for Habermas it needs supplementing with an account of the behavioural mechanisms by which children are socialised.” Not surprisingly for someone formed in the Frankfurt school, Habermas worries about power and its abuse in ways that Gadamer ignores. He wants a free conversation, free especially from any force of threat of force. Language is the medium of knowledge, but language can oppress and communicate ideologies.