ABSTRACT
Jürgen Habermas’s 1965 inaugural address, “Knowledge and Human Interests,” initiated a radical critique of knowledge, a project that was intended to have sweeping implications for epistemology.1 Arguing that the sciences and social sciences have become estranged from their legitimate tasks, Habermas attempts to situate questions of epistemology within the realm of genuine human interests. This task is all the more urgent because the separation of knowledge from human interests has not only led the sciences further and further into the delusion of disinterested contemplation, the snare of positivism and historicism, but also granted privilege to instruction in control over emancipation by means of enlightenment.2 The concept of knowledge free from human interests, Habermas argues, is an ideological remnant of idealism, privileging an instrumental attitude toward all things at the expense of practical concerns and desires. With a new orientation toward enlightenment, it is hoped that the unity of rational investigation and human interest can transform the illegitimate severing of knowledge from interest and thereby assist in the realization of a society free from domination. This critical-theoretical project announced in 1965 found its initial formulation in Habermas’s On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967) and Knowledge and Human Interests (1968).
