Modernization,Rationalization,and Education: Responding to the Other

Rationality and Worldviews

2.4 When we use the term ‘rational’ we usually attribute it either to people or to expressions or actions. Either someone (person) or something (idea, worldview) is rational. For a pragmatic philosopher of language, the term ‘rational’ can be applied to any person capable of speech and action in general, and in a less broad sense, anyone able in principle to offer reasons for their actions or views. A symbolic expression or an action is rational insofar as it can be potentially defended against criticism (Habermas, 1991, 16).

2.5 Communicative practice as we experience it in its everyday form, in its discursive or critical dimension, is imbued with rationality. In our interactions we implicitly or explicitly agree or disagree, approve or disapprove, accept or reject, either by means of power, control, violence and suppression or by means of a communicatively achieved consensus. The latter differs from a pseudo-consensus in that it derives from genuine, responsible and equal dialogical positions and not from strategicality and monological promotion of self- interest. Rationality is ubiquitous and indispensable to a communicatively achieved agreement, since the latter ‘is based in the end on reasons. And the rationality of those who participate in this communicative practice is determined by whether, if necessary, they could under suitable circumstances, provide reasons for their expressions’ (17).

2.6 In my opinion, the Habermasian conception of rationality relates to and goes beyond polemics in a path-breaking way. The Occidental philosophical past offers numerous examples of reciprocal charges of irrationalism between conflicting theories or worldviews. A theoretical system of a Cartesian origin that sees reason as intellectus can very easily attack any philosophical theory that assumes an empirical or situated reason as supposedly being irrational. For polemical reasons the charge of irrationalism has been employed effectively to refute and exclude whoever or whatever diverges from a certain and narrow definition of the rational. The opponent is irrational not because of the way s/he is involved in a discourse but because of the content of her worldview. One must be very cautious with this sort of material discrimination between theories or ideas because as a polemical tactic it does not do justice to difference and otherness. As a methodological tool of research, it loses sight of the fact that a worldview may be less accurate in its description of objects or unfair in the social relations it sustains compared with another one, but it can be equally coherent and systematic. As Radin, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss and others have shown contrary to what Lévy-Bruhl or Cassirer assumed, a mythical worldview is no less rational (if rational is understood to mean formal-logical, coherent, and systematic) than a modern worldview. It might be less or more infused with internal contradictions or circularities but as a whole it can very well provide reasons for particular ideas or actions within it (Kondylis, 1987, 17).

2.7 Irrationality is a restraining force in a discourse when it is expressed as an unwillingness to assume a reflective attitude towards our own interpretation of the world. For Habermas, ‘one behaves irrationally if one employs one's own symbolic means of expression in a dogmatic way’ (Habermas, 1991, 22). In this vein, we may even be led to the conclusion that our own culture is irrational when it asserts its own content dogmatically and circularly against the overall content of other cultures and excludes them from the educational agenda. Habermas's ‘procedural’ definition of irrationality can serve the purpose of assessing discourses (showing whether they are dogmatic, ideological, coercive or free and undistorted) without excluding different contents of thinking as irrational, pre-rational or inferior. Its prima facie implication for education is its telling incompatibility with the dogmatic discrimination against otherness on grounds of rational cultural content.

2.8 His insights appear to be even more liberating if we take into account the double thinking of those postmodernist theorists who denounce traditional accounts of rationality. They do so because reason supposedly leads to a marginalization and exclusion of an opponent in agonistics by charging her with irrationality. But the double thinking becomes apparent when they themselves do not resist the temptation to invert the charge and equate (for polemical reasons and sometimes even without good grounds) the ‘rational’ with ‘rationalist’ or ‘logocentric’ and discard it in one blow.

2.9 When extended to worldviews, the definition of rationality (as non-dogmatism and problematization of self-affirmation) a Habermasian sociologist employs allows for evaluation and critique without a premature labelling as ‘irrational’ or ‘savage’ of different world-understandings. Still, even this redefinition of reason would not meet the approval of some postmodernist thinkers, for it is the very possibility of any rational assessment they dispute. Elizabeth Grosz argues that ‘the crisis of reason consists [among other things she has mentioned -M.P.] in the impossibility of rationally deciding between competing methods and paradigms produced from different positions’ (Grosz, 1993, 194). A Habermasian would challenge Grosz's assertion and so would do any educationalist following Nussbaum's defence of the cultivation of critical citizenship. With regard to schooling, the vision of an emancipatory education, one that assists the young to make informed existential choices, is incompatible with the ‘anything goes’ of the postmodernist attack on criteriology and the perspectivalist understanding of cultural diversion. For openness to alterity not to be aloof and consequently, indifferent and blind to the Other, what one needs is to be convinced that a critical engagement with any Other is possible in principle.

2.10 But one must set two basic conditions in order to avoid a contradiction between this possibility of assessment of the rationality of different worldviews and the previous assumption that there are not totally irrational or pre-logical worldviews or cultures. The first guarantees that the evaluation is not carried out with a mathematical, abstract and worse still, self- assertive reason in opposition to experience, feelings, empathy and desire. And the second safeguards that cognitive achievements and instrumental-technical progress are not the only criteria for judging and consequently, that other, non-cognitive, dimensions of Being have already gained a status at least equivalent to the one granted to cognition or technical control. Knowledge and rationality are broader terms than cognition and calculation. The cognitive relation to the world of existing things is just one kind of relation to the world. The rationality of worldviews should not be measured only in terms of our relation to the objective world but also in terms of our relation to the social and subjective worlds (Habermas, 1991, 45).

2.11 True, a culture is often considered less rational than an other one when its logic is framed by its worldview in such a way that it does not allow for cognitive development. This becomes obvious if we consider the knowledge of a society that views medicine and healing as dependent solely on magic spells. It appears to us cognitively less rational if we compare it to the knowledge of the body and its efficacy in a society where culture is uncoupled from nature so that the mythical-magical element loses its links to natural/causal necessity. [Alternative medicine based on a particular knowledge of nature and the body that does not resemble the Occidental knowledge is a different issue and I would not equate it with magic]. But there is a possibility that this society might be more advanced and rational with respect to interpersonal relations within it than the one that progresses cognitively. Even if that is not the case, still, the non-rationalized culture does not lack logic or possess a different logic or different ways of reasoning. The potential for rationality is always there where a communicative competence demarcates ordinary language from non-articulated, non-differentiated sound. ‘[A]lthough they may be interpreted in various ways and applied according to different criteria, concepts like truth, rationality, or justification play the same grammatical role in every linguistic community’ (Habermas, 1992, 138).

2.12 To summarize, we may discern certain formal properties a culture must have if rational action orientations are to be possible at all. These are the possibility of raising differentiated validity claims, the possibility of a reflective relation to itself (absence of dogmatism), the possibility of cultural objectivations (e.g. higher-level validity claims related to different spheres of experience) and an uncoupling of purposive-rational from communicative action. But the difference in the degree of rationalization should not be mistaken for a difference in dispositions and properties of human beings; the actual must not be identified with the potential. It is not only empirically provable but also politically necessary to consider all societies and cultures as equally endowed with logic and potentially with rationality. Otherwise we fall prey to a subtle racism or tribalism or we abstain from any evaluative/normative judgements and thus fall prey to a politically inoperative relativism. Of course, self-reflection forces the universalistic account of reason to consider its own origins as well as its own limits. The modern world is well ahead in terms of technical progress but it can be by far superseded by other cultures when it comes to other more subtle relations to norms, nature, sexuality, corporeality, care and so on.

2.13 What enables western rationality to conceive universal validity claims when it is not legitimate for itself to impose its own understanding on other cultures and have more than particularistic claims? Is this not a paradox related to our own position in our culture? This paradox can be resolved, I believe, as soon as we understand our worldview as a plurality of different and often divergent elements and recognize the Other within. We should see the conception of universalism as related to that modern understanding of the world that is indeed based on general structures of rationality but it is only one achievement of our self-reflection and it is often tarnished by other aspects of our worldview. Due to the latter, ‘modern Western societies promote a distorted understanding of rationality that is fixed on cognitive-instrumental aspects and is to that extent particularistic’ (Habermas, 1991, 66). Moreover, if rationalization appears as a learning process, it is more likely that it will not take the form of a continuum, and it will not be without disruptions and regressions. It is also possible that it will not have the anticipated or desired effect (66-7). Modernization should have been understood as a result of such a rationalization and not as another term for denoting rationalization as such.

Rationalization and the Critique of Weber

2.14 As early as 1968, Habermas postulates that in order to reformulate what Weber called ‘rationalization’, one should overcome the subjective approach that Parsons shares with Weber and couch one's problematic in the categorial framework of work and interaction. Work as purposive- rational action (instrumental and strategic) realises defined goals under given conditions but interaction refers only to communicative action or symbolic interaction (Habermas, 1987, 91). When rationalization is associated with instrumental action it generates a growth of productive forces and extension of technological control, and when related to social interaction it generates extension of uncoerced communication (Habermas, 1988).

2.15 The Habermasian shift to language that took place later gave to his challenge of Weber's categorial framework and the basic premises of traditional social theory a more substantive form. It offered the conceptual tools for a clearer redefinition of different rationalities and a deeper critical examination of Weber's distinction of value spheres, description of rationalization and its connection to modernization. [At the same time, it signified a departure from a Marxist explanation of social evolution, for it is rationalization rather than social conflict as such that paves the way to social change and development.] A critique of Weber's theory from a Habermasian point of view, concerning those issues of reason that are relevant to the aims of this article, can be summarized in the following points. The first is the narrowing of the concept of reason, the second refers to the lack of unity of reason and the irreducibility of value spheres, the third to the omission of selectivity and counterfactuality, and the fourth to the Weberian paradox.

2.16 Habermas criticizes Weber's pessimistic diagnosis of an irreducible separation and antagonism of value spheres and the consequent incompatibility of the corresponding validity claims. As soon as different cultural value spheres gained autonomy, they became closed structures, independent from each other for their justification or currency. So Weber laments the fact that with religions and mythical world interpretations having lost their all- encompassing character, the grounds for a coherent and unifying legitimation disappeared; for instance the beautiful is no longer the good and the true is no longer the beautiful.

2.17 However, he fails to see, according to Habermas, that these spheres, without losing their independence and equal status vis-à-vis each other, can be prevented from being absolute and non-permeable totalities, only if we see the rationalities corresponding to them as moments of argumentative reason. The latter should not have been given up to irreconcilable, closed and self-referential modes of reason. ‘The unity of rationality in the multiplicity of value spheres rationalized according to their inner logics is secured precisely at the formal level of the argumentative redemption of validity claims. Validity claims differ from empirical claims through the presupposition that they can be made good by means of arguments’ (Habermas, 1991, 249). If we do not presuppose a unity achieved through argumentative rationality we are left with the cumbersome issue of how to maintain the universalism of criteriology, or, in other words, how it is possible for reason to critique itself (the so-called paradox of reason).

2.18 The paradox of reason is caused by an incomplete transition from unity and totality to a dialectic reconciliation of the whole with symmetrically differentiated particularities. The rationality of only some of the autonomized cultural spheres (e.g., nomological sciences) is anchored in domains of law, art, and morality, thus overshadowing and suppressing their own intrinsic mode of rationality. Symptoms of a one-sided rationalization are the ostensible identity of modernization and systematization in modernity, the penetration and reification of the lifeworld by subsystems like the economy and the state, and the collapse of parts of the communicative stock of the lifeworld due to system imperatives. Weber saw in his diagnosis of loss of freedom, identity and meaning a paradox of reason, because he himself unconsciously adopted and theoretically pursued what had already occurred in practice regarding reason: an alteration of its meaning. ‘In the transition from cultural to societal rationalization, the Weberian concept of rationality, which is, in any case, tailored to purposive-rational action’, became narrow (221). Weber used the purposive rationality of entrepreneurial activity as it is institutionalized in the capitalist enterprise as a springboard for investigating and explaining societal rationalization (218).

2.19 In contradistinction to what Weber believed, the types of rationality complementary to the strategic one have co- determined the Occidental process of rationalization, although they themselves misunderstood ‘their role and nature by associating themselves with the perspective […] of a rationality of means and ends’ (Apel, 1993, 42- 3). Non-strategic modes of thinking and acting appeared as strategic and misled Occidental self-understanding. A reformulation of notions developed within modernity and associated with reason (e.g. autonomy, solidarity, and human rights), would accomplish their redemption from their strategic function in the framework of another paradigm. They would have to be dissociated from strategic rationality and redeemed from their servile role.

2.20 This domination by strategic and purposive rationality - which ironically was not only Weber's diagnosis but apparently his own snare - resulted in a selectivity. A selective pattern of rationalization occurs ‘when (at least) one cultural value sphere is insufficiently institutionalized’. The marginalized component of the given culture lacks any structure-forming effect on society as a whole. As a result, ‘(at least) one sphere predominates to such an extent that it subjects life-orders to a form of rationality that is alien to them’ (Habermas, 1991, 240). Had Weber proceeded further along the lines of his own assertions about the differentiation of value spheres and had he observed this selectivity of rationalization (a) he would have not missed the counterfactual element of reason, and (b) he would have not over- dramatized the so-called Weberian paradox.

2.21 Weber started immediately from the actually existing and dominant Occidental forms of rationality, instead of taking into account the counterfactually projected possibilities of a ‘rationalized lifeworld’ (222). Where Weber went wrong according to Habermas was in the hasty connection of purposive rationality with societal rationalization process. He did not view ‘the historical profile of this process against the background of what was structurally possible’ (233). Weber did not see the kind of modernization that occurred as just one of the possibilities opened by a rationalization of worldviews.

2.22 What is important for my argument is that Habermas's critique of Weber proves that a worldview may proceed toward a post-conventional, universalistic, and rational account of validity without exploiting the possibility opened by a comprehensive, context-sensitive, but universal reason and without pursuing the possibilities this opens for humanity. Hence such a worldview ultimately legitimizes the pathologies and crises the system generates at the levels of personality, society, and culture. Thus, one may acknowledge that Occidental rationalism had and has a potential for the redemption of universal validity claims without simultaneously assuming that it really succeeded in that. Furthermore, we may still believe in this potential without assuming that the actual route the West takes is higher than non-western counterparts at all levels or that this potential is not available to other cultures. The obvious benefits of such accounts of rationalization for a multicultural education render the former a candidate for theorizing the latter effectively.

2.23 In short, Occidental rationalism evolves selectively and emerges as one- sided, partial, and even tyrannical. Social integration and preservation of social lifeworlds become more problematic, the more the inflated subsystems of economy and the state anchor in and reify these lifeworlds marginalizing whatever does not conform to their imperatives. One mode of reason, then, de-institutionalizes, excludes, marginalizes, and expands at the expense of, other modes of reason. The practical outcome is the suppression of difference at a social level, when minority groups, or race, class, gender/sexual preference movements are bereft of access to and effective participation in public life. It is precisely this deprivation that is mirrored in many Western curricula. Criticisms of Weber from a Habermasian point of view show that the problems caused by a selective rationalization can be confronted by a more comprehensive and encompassing rationalization. Consequently, we see once again, that modernization as a historical phenomenon is not, and should not be, identified with rationalization as such. Reason as the totality of its manifestations is not complicit with what its partial and one-dimensional application (among other causes) has produced.

2.24 For Habermas, ‘rationalization means overcoming […] systematically distorted communication in which the action- supporting consensus concerning the reciprocally raised validity claims […] can be sustained in appearance only, that is, counterfactually’ (Habermas, 1984, 120). Problem-solving argumentation and consensual resolution of conflicts is dependent on the rationality of the social agents. If this is true, then any attempt to explain social development ‘with reference to a dynamic of social struggle that is structurally located within the moral space of social interactions’ (Honneth, 1991, xvii) presupposes a reference to a logic of rationalization. Honneth identifies two Habermasian approaches to the problem of social evolution, i.e., one that examines the relation between systems and lifeworlds with aid of an account of rationalization, and one that emphasizes ‘the dynamic of social struggle’. In response to Honneth's consideration of the second approach as more promising, I would defend the former as indispensable to the latter. Habermas's sociology has to rely at least equally on a recuperation of reason and on the dynamics of social interaction in order to propound not only a description but also a critique of Occidental societies. For, the dynamics of social interaction can be politically promising only via teleology, i.e. that metaphysics that ignores the normative neutrality of the concept of dynamics as such and ‘loads’ it with an ethical destiny. To retain political promise without teleology, one cannot but find recourse to the critical force of a rationality that in its multidimensionality encompasses practical reason and ethics.

Reason Revisited

2.25 Now let us combine the findings of each section into a demand for a particular concept of reason and examine how Habermas's theory can meet this demand. To be able to compare alternative cultural patterns and make political or existential choices accordingly without prioritizing one's own from the start, one needs a notion of reason that is both immanent and transcendent. It must be immanent qua context-sensitive and situated and transcendent qua capable of self-critique and other-oriented assessment. To promote the possibility for fruitful and unassimilating exchange among cultures we need a conception of deliberative reason that allows for a dialogue that goes beyond compromise. To achieve a critical outlook with regard to hegemonic tendencies of the Occidental modernization we need a conception of rational self-reflection that is capable of discerning between acts based on strategic rationality and acts based on communicative rationality and acknowledge the normative priority of the latter. ^[3] In a nutshell, we need a reason that is not limited to technological and scientific progress.

2.26 Admittedly, all these issues cannot be tackled within the space of an article thus I shall confine myself to a general outline of how Habermas and his associates promote research in this direction. However, two points should be raised in advance. The first can be better illustrated if we examine how this definition of rationality differs considerably from the one Niklas Luhmann employs. In fact, Luhmann terms ‘reason’ what Habermas seems to term alternatively ‘reason’ or ‘rationality’. For Luhmann, ‘“reason” always refers to human capacity, and the capacity that makes reason a distinct phenomenon is always a human capacity’. But as he argues, we should look to criteria that can be applied to systems, whether they are social systems or psychic systems. ‘The term “rationality” is better adapted to this task’ (Luhmann, 1993, 221). Whereas for Luhmann rationality is more significant than reason, Habermas is more interested in the human capacity to reflect on the world and one's conditions of life.

2.27 The second point concerns the fact that seeing reason as a human disposition does not amount to seeing reason merely as an organ. Habermas avoids the naturalism that is sometimes associated with a conception of reason as a species-specific property. ‘The achievements of the transcendental subject have their basis in the natural history of the human species.’ Isolated from its context, this thesis could engender the misunderstanding that reason is an organ of adaptation for human beings just as claws and teeth are for animals. But this is not the only function it serves. The human interests that have emerged in humankind's natural history, with which Habermas has associated the knowledge-constitutive interests, derive both from nature and from the cultural break with nature. In this way, for him, ‘knowledge equally serves as an instrument and transcends mere self-preservation’ (Habermas, 1987b, 312).

2.28 Moreover, on Habermas's account, rationality refers to the disposition of speaking and acting subjects to acquire and use fallible knowledge. Hence it differs from an abstract self-referential and minimally informative sense of rationality. In Apel's words: ‘We must distinguish the logos of reason as such, i.e., the self-reflexive logos of argumentation or of discursive rationality from the non-reflexive “abstract” logos of logico-mathematical rationality’ (Apel, 1993, 46). And Wellmer (1992) suggests that we take as our paradigm of rationality not logical deduction or algorithmic calculation, but the rationality of a good dialogue where the new way in which an argument is presented may be constitutive of its force with respect to an old problem.

2.29 Given those two points, a broader conception of rationality is not only manifestly and programmatically announced in Apel's and Habermas's works but it follows indeed from their epistemological, ontological and anthropological assumptions. What has to be further examined is how this conception of reason relates to science and technology - therefore implicitly to the historical development of the Occidental culture.

2.30 Apel frequently deplores the pathological intrusion of science and systems like economy and state to the lifeworld. But he believes that a monism emerging from a strict separation of science and hermeneutics and the one-way dependence of the former on the latter is a mere inversion of the polarization encouraged by positivism and scientism and thus is just as untenable as an unmitigated dualism. Habermas would agree with Apel and would also maintain that science can take on an emancipatory task. Habermas and Apel suspect any privileging of either kind of reason and defend a complementarity between understanding and explanation (therefore: humanities and sciences).

2.31 Overall, despite the fact that some issues around the relation of reason and science are contentious even within the second generation of Frankfurt School thinkers, what matters in the present discussion is the following. The Habermasian conception of reason allows for a critical reconsideration of the directions of the scientific mode of rationality and questions the worshipful insistence on its proclamation a ground for the prioritization of the West over other lifeworlds. Therefore it provides a further basis for a solid justification of the claim for changes in the curriculum such that divest the scientific worldview of the monolithic primacy it has been granted in education.

2.32 Let us turn, then, to the relation of human beings to their world and how the critique of modernization, science, and technology enables the theoretical accommodation of the significance of other aspects of existence. This is a necessary venture, if one wishes to justify the promotion of a cognitive and a cultural curricular pluralism and multidimensionality in education.

2.33 Apel remarks that modernity set the logos of classical metaphysics in the service of the propositional representation of facticity in abstraction from the pragmatic dimension of speech. There has been a deliberate separation of the representational functions of speech from those of a pragmatic nature. The exclusion of the latter from the philosophical domain of thought and their relegation to the domains of poetics and rhetoric severed reason from its relation to practice. The communicative and self-expressive functions of speech and the validity claims corresponding to the rationality of these functions continued losing their prestige along with their philosophical relevance in modern times (Apel, 1993, 38).

2.34 The rehabilitation of those aspects of our relation to the world that modern accounts of the human excluded or underestimated broadens rationality and has a crucial implication for the possibility of rational critique. Reason itself can in principle provide the means for criticizing itself because reason as a whole is always more comprehensive than its particular manifestation - activated whenever a certain critique takes shape. And this more encompassing conception of reason presupposes, among other things, an account of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of human beings that differs from the one assumed by the psychoanalytically influenced early Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.

2.35 Rationalization seen by Georg Lukacs as reification in ‘exchange-value’ (or wage-labour) is reworked, complemented with the concept of alienation, and expanded by Adorno and Horkheimer. The aim is firstly to explain the phenomenon of reason itself concerning the subject and the species, and second to diagnose and criticize the pathologies of western societies. Reason provides the means for a vulnerable being to subordinate nature and serve its desire for self-preservation. However, this reason is instrumental since it objectifies the world and reifies other humans in order to make them more manipulable. It is a subjective rationality because it serves the subject's ends and survival. And this occurs at the expense of the individual's inner world of unconscious desires and instincts and the reconciliation of human beings with their external world. The myth of Ulysses is interpreted magnificently by Horkheimer and Adorno in terms of the anthropology described above (Papastephanou, 2000). This anthropology assumes that subjective or instrumental reason is a survival mechanism from the very beginning of societies and cultures. Modernization is just one stage in the evolution of reason.

2.36 At first sight, the ideas of the early Critical Theory seem conducive to the task of uncoupling modernization from rationalization. But the advent of civilization appears in Critical Theory inexorably connected with the reifying power of reason from the start. What was launched as a critique of positivism, capitalism, liberalism and their ontological assumptions was then extended to reason wholesale. Such critique of reason, however, points automatically to an ‘other’ of reason, perhaps a reason once again, only this time opposed to the subjective one. However, Horkheimer and Adorno do not have the conceptual means to offer an account of this reason because whatever they say will be said by means of subjective reason (since it is the only one they recognize anthropologicaly-psychoanalytically). ‘The critique of instrumental reason, which remains bound to the conditions of the philosophy of the subject, denounces as a defect something that it cannot explain in its defectiveness’. It does so ‘because it lacks a conceptual framework sufficiently flexible to capture the integrity of what is destroyed through instrumental reason’ (Habermas, 1991, 389). The critique promoted by the early Critical Theory, ensnared in its own presuppositions of a reifying reason, becomes disarmed and ineffective. It can only allude to an Other of reason; it can only point to it sometimes as reconciliation, at other times as mimesis (Papastephanou, 2000).

2.37 What appears as a paradox is not due to reason itself, but due to the premises of the theory of reason the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse) employed. According to Habermas, the first generation remained trapped in the philosophy of consciousness and was unable to rework the notion of the subject, the notion of knowledge and reflection, and consequently, the notion of reason. The subject is related to a world of states of affairs and this relation is established one-sidedly as only cognitive. A paradigm of intersubjectivity rehabilitates precisely those other aspects of our relation to the world that offer us a standpoint for criticizing the excesses of subject-centered reason. Reason is enriched with more dimensions and allows for a critique of reason within reason. In this way, the merits of Adorno's critique of instrumental reason are rescued and transferred to a fresh paradigm of thought, one that does justice to non-cognitive aspects of life without tarnishing reason wholesale.

2.38 The concept of communicative reason that in Habermas's theory comes to supplement purposive rationality can be articulated plausibly after having rehabilitated the non-cognitive but still rational aspects of thought. Reason is not meant to apply simply to truth-intentions, or to truth of objects, or to truth of norms individually and in a narrow sense. ‘Rather, reason should reveal the unity of the moments of reason separated out in all three Kantian critiques: the unity of theoretical reason with practical/moral insight and the critique of judgment’ (Habermas, 1992b, 101). Apel, Habermas, Wellmer (1992) and others whose work draws upon a pragmatic philosophy of language attempt to find a third way for achieving this unity without harming the plurality and freedom gained with the distinction between the manifestations of reason. That requires more than a rehabilitation of our threefold relation to the world. It needs a reformulation of those basic assumptions of the first generation of Frankfurt School that are mirrored in their interpretation of the myth of Ulysses and which happen to be shared by many thinkers from different philosophical traditions. Knowledge, reflection, self-preservation and human interests are some of the ideas in question. However, what matters for the argument of the present article is that without a rehabilitation of the threefold relation to the world, one is not in a position to criticize the Occidental conception of rationalization. Nor can one forward a demand for cosmopolitan education, and enrich taught materials with values that facilitate such objectives.