answers to ethical questions about what they ought to become.
Philosophers as different as Aristotle, Hegel and Marx all argued that
any distinction between ‘what man is’ and ‘what he ought to be’ (and
hence between description and prescription) are misleading and
confused. At any given historical moment, understanding ‘what man
is’ is always a matter of grasping the underlying process imminent in
man’s present situation and in terms of which he strives to transform
himself in order to realize his true ‘potentialities’ or ‘essence’.
Habermas’s theory of communicative competence is an ethical theory
of self-realization which transposes the source of human ideals onto
language and discourse. For the purpose of Habermas’s theory is to
try and establish how, inherent in, and anticipated by, everyday human
speech, there is a conception of an ideal form of life in which the sort
of rational autonomy served by the emancipatory interest can be
realized. In effect, therefore, the theory of communicative competence
seeks to show how the normative justification for emancipatory
knowledge is embedded in the structure of the communicative action
which a critical social science is concerned to analyze and explore.