Freedom and Determinism

by Jrgen Habermas
1



(Kyoto Prize Address, November 10, 2004. Translated by Joel Anderson)

Free will is currently the subject of a lively debate in Germany, engaging
even the national news. One has the feeling of being transported back
into the 19
th
century. For once again the results of brain research this
time, with the help of imaging technology have given renewed
relevance to a time-honored philosophical debate. Neurologists and
cognitive scientists are arguing with philosophers and others in the
humanities over the determinist standpoint, according to which the
causally self-contained world leaves no room for freedom of choice
between alternative actions. The current controversy stems from the
results of a research tradition going back to the experiments conducted
by Benjamin Libet in the 1970s.
2


These findings seem to support reductionist research strategies that aim
to explain mental events solely on the basis of observable physiological
conditions.
3
These approaches presuppose that the sense of freedom
that agents attribute to themselves rests on self-deception. The
experience of making ones own decisions represents an extraneous
wheel that does no work. Understood as mental causation, freedom of
the will is an illusion, concealing a thoroughly causal chain of neural
states linked according to natural laws.
4


This determinism is, however, incompatible with the ordinary self-
understanding of acting subjects. In everyday life, we cannot avoid
presumptively attributing to one another responsible authorship for our
actions. The prospect that our actions might be explained scientifically by
means of deterministic laws cannot seriously challenge our intuitively
anchored and pragmatically sustained understanding of ourselves as
accountable agents. The objectivizing language of neurobiology
attributes to the brain the grammatical role previously played by the I,
but this gets no uptake in the language of everyday psychology. The
reaction provoked by supposing that it is the brain not my self that

1
I would like once again to thank Lutz Wingert, who is more at home in this discussion
than I, for detailed advice that has advanced my thinking on these matters and Tilman
Habermas for helpful suggestions for improvements.
2
Chr. Geyer (ed.), Hirnforschung und Willensfreiheit. Zur Deutung der neuesten
Experimente (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004).
3
G. Roth, Worber Hirnforscher reden drfen und in welcher Weise? Deutsche
Zeitschrift fr Philosophie 52 (2004): 223-34, here, 231.
4
It doesnt matter for determinism whether or not natural laws are interpreted
probabilistically. For free choice [Willkr] cannot be reduced to chance [Zufall].
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 2
thinks and acts is, of course, merely a grammatical fact; but that is how
the lifeworld shields itself from cognitive dissonance.

This wouldnt be the first time, of course, that a scientific theory collided
with common sense. But is determinism actually a scientifically
established thesis, or is it rather merely part of a naturalistic worldview
generated by a speculative interpretation of scientific knowledge? I would
like to continue the debate over freedom and determinism as a debate
over the right way to naturalize the mind.

On the one hand, we want to do justice to the intuitively incontestable
self-evidence of a sense of freedom that performatively accompanies our
every action; on the other hand, we want to satisfy the need for a
coherent picture of the universe that includes humans as part of nature.
Kant was able to reconcile causality through freedom with causality by
nature only by adopting a dualism between the intelligible and
phenomenal realms. Today we would prefer to do without such
metaphysical presuppositions. To do so, however, we have to harmonize
what we learned from Kant about the transcendental conditions for our
knowledge with what Darwin has taught us about natural evolution.

I would like to begin by introducing a phenomenologically appropriate
concept of free action. This concept is connected to a dualism of
explanatory perspectives (1). Reductionistic research strategies subvert
this dualism only by declaring the self-understanding of persons for whom
reasons count to be epiphenomenal (2). It is doubtful, in any case,
whether there is any getting around the complementary intermeshing of
these two epistemic perspectives (3). This deep-seated dualism is
compatible with a monistic conception, however, because it must have
emerged simultaneously with our cultural form of life (4). In the final
section, I conjecture a non-determinist picture of the interaction between
mind and brain (5).

(1) Benjamin Libet asked his experimental subjects, under neurological
observation, to move an arm spontaneously and report the point in time
of the decision.
5
In the brain, an action-specific readiness-potential
appears to form before the person self decides to act. This result
regarding the temporal sequence of neuronal occurrence and subjective
experience seems to prove that brain processes determine conscious
actions without any role being played by an act of will that the agent
considers his own. But experiments of this sort can hardly shoulder the
burden of proof they are supposed to carry regarding the thesis of
determinism. As with any experimental design, the question arises as to
what is being measured and the prior philosophical question, as to what
really ought to be measured.

5
For the experimental setup and later control experiments, see G. Roth, Fhlen, Denken,
Handeln (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), 518-28.
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 3

Normally, actions are the result of a complex chain of intentions and
deliberations that weigh ends and alternative means in light of
opportunities, resources, and obstacles. Libet is not alone in designing his
experiments in a way that abstracts the planning, decision, and execution
of a bodily movement from any context of broader-reaching goals or well-
founded alternatives. These artificial setups are missing precisely what
makes an action a free action in the first place: the internal connection
with reasons. It is a misunderstanding to regard the freedom of being-
able-to-act-so-and-not-otherwise as exemplified by Buridans ass. The
bare decision to extend ones left or right arm fails to demonstrate any
freedom of action as long as there is no contact with reasons, such as
could, for example, motivate a bicyclist to turn to the right or the left.
Only once such deliberations are involved does the realm of freedom
open up, for it is simply part of the meaning of deliberation that we could
act so and also otherwise.
6


Peter Bieri has dissolved, in a phenomenologically convincing manner, the
confusions attending the concept of an unconditioned will.
7
If an act of
free decision means that the actor binds his will by reasons, then
the openness of the decision is not ruled out by its being rationally
constrained. The actor is free when he wills what he considers the
correct result of his deliberation. What we experience as unfreedom is
only the externally imposed constraint that forces us to act otherwise
than we, according to our own insight, want to act. This yields a concept
of conditioned freedom that takes into account equally both aspects of a
freedom within rational constraints.

On the one hand, the actor wont reach a decisive practical judgment on
how to act without weighing alternative courses of action. These
alternatives do, of course, present themselves within a field of
possibilities that is limited by capacities, character, and circumstances.
But in view of the alternatives to be weighed, the actor must be confident
that he can act in one way but also in another. This is because, for the
reflective actor, his capacities, his character, and the circumstances
transform themselves into just as many reasons for what he, within a
given context, is himself capable of doing. In this sense, he is not
unconditionally free to act one way or another. In the course of his
reflections, the actor reaches a rationally motivated position that is not
arbitrary because it is not unwarranted.

On the other hand, it is impossible to comprehend the motivating role of
reason on the model of an observable event being caused by a prior

6
E. Tugendhat, Der Begriff der Willensfreiheit, in his Philosophische Aufstze
(Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 334-51; here, p. 340.
7
P. Bieri, Das Handwerk der Freiheit: ber die Entdeckung des eigenen Willens
(Munich: Hanser, 2001).
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 4
condition. The judging process empowers the agent as the author of a
decision. Were it a causally explicable natural process, the agent would
feel disempowered, that is, robbed of initiative. That is why it is not
simply grammatically mistaken to say that, if the actor had judged
differently, he would have had to will differently. The forceless force of
the better argument that motivates our taking a yes or no position is
to be distinguished from the imposed constraints that require us to act
otherwise than we want to act.

We can explain what it means to be rationally motivated by reasons only
from the perspective of a participant in the public process of giving and
taking reasons (Robert Brandom). That is why an observer has to
describe discursive events in mentalistic language, that is, in a language
that includes predicates such as believes and convinces, approves
and rejects. In an empiricist language, he would have to eliminate for
grammatical reasons any reference to the propositional attitudes of
subjects who take things to be true or false. From this point of view, a
discursive event is transformed into a natural event that, so to speak,
takes place behind the backs of subjects.

(2) The concept of rationally conditioned freedom brings with it a model
of explaining action by reasons that departs from the standard causal
model. Unlike the usual causal explanation, the rational explanation of an
action does not specify the sufficient conditions for the actual occurrence
of an action-event. For the motivating power of reasons for action
presupposes that they are, under certain conditions, decisive for the
acting subject, that is, they are sufficient to bind the agents will.
Motivation by reasons requires not merely an agent for whom reasons
count but who lets himself be determined by insight. The reference to a
subject who could also act against his better judgment already shows
why the statement that S performed action A for reason R is not
equivalent to the statement that R caused the action A.
8
Unlike ordinary
causal explanation, rational explanations of action do not permit the
inference that any given person would reach the same decision under the
same antecedent conditions. Specifying the reasonable motives for
action does not identify the sufficient conditions for transforming that
kind of explanation into a prediction. Responsible authorship involves not
merely being motivated by reasons but rather taking the initiative, for
reasons, and attributing the initiative to oneself: thats what makes an
actor an author of his actions.

The idea that its up to him to act one way and not another requires
both: he must be convinced that hes doing the right thing, but he also
has to do it himself. The spontaneity we experience in acting is not to be
understood as some anonymous source but rather as a subject that

8
On this argument, see J. Searle, Freiheit und Neurobiologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2004), pp. 28-36.
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 5
attributes to itself the capability to act. Indeed, an agent can consider
himself the author of his actions, because he has identified himself with
his own body and exists as a lived body that enables and empowers him
to perform actions. There is no diminution of freedom when the agent
lets himself be determined by the organic substratum that he
experiences as his lived body, since he experiences his subjective nature
as a source of capabilities. From the perspective of this visceral
experience, the vegetative processes guided by the limbic system like
all the other brain processes that neurological observers treat as
unconscious are transformed from causal determinants into enabling
conditions. In this sense, freedom of action is freedom not simply
rationally conditioned but naturally conditioned. Since the body
[Krper] as lived body [Leib] is in each case ones own body, it
determines what one can do: Being determined provides constitutive
support for self-determination.
9
The same holds true in a similar way for
the character that we develop in the course of our individual lives. The
author is in each case the unique person one has become or the
irreplaceable [unvertretbare] individual that one understands oneself to
be.

The discussion up to now has elaborated a strong though not idealistic
concept of freedom of action that is supposed to describe the relevant
phenomenon appropriately in the first place. This concept is associated
with a concept of the rational explanation of actions that calls attention to
an inescapable dualism between different explanatory perspectives and
language games. This is, of course, an epistemic dualism only in a
methodological and not an ontological sense. But it is not yet clear how it
can be squared with a monistic conception of the universe that would
meet our need for a coherent picture of the world. The proponents of
reductionistic approaches avoid this dualism by dispensing with one of the
two explanatory perspectives. Indeed, the research strategies that rely
solely on hard causal explanations and that relegate soft rational
explanations to the realm of illusionary folk psychology have again and
again been able to gain acceptance for their counterintuitive ideas.

With regard to mental phenomena, however, reductionism does pay a
high price; it has to treat self-conscious life as an epiphenomenon. As we
have seen, semantic entities such as reasons are not the sort of thing
that can be either identified as observable events governed by natural
laws or comprehended as standard causes. That is not particularly
surprising. We have known since Frege and Husserl that neither
propositional content nor intentional objects can be individuated in the
spatio-temporal frame of reference for causally efficient events and states.
That can also be explained in terms of how the concept of causation is
interwoven with the functional unit of instrumental action. When we
interpret the succession of two observable states of the world, A and B,

9
M. Seel, Sich bestimmen lassen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 288.
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 6
as a causal relation (in the strict sense that A is a sufficient condition for
the occurrence of B), we are implicitly working with the idea that by
intervening instrumentally in the world and producing A, we ourselves
could thereby give rise to state B ourselves.
10
This interventionist
background to the concept of causation makes clear why mental states
and semantic content, which cannot be manipulated instrumentally the
way things and events can, elude this sort of causal explanation.

But if reasons and their logical processing have to be dismissed as
epiphenomena,
11
then the self-understanding of competent speaking and
acting subjects is not left with much of a causal role to play. From the
neurobiological standpoint, the role reasons play is merely that of
rationalizing post hoc commentary on unconsciously caused and
neurologically explainable behavior. But then it remains puzzling why the
extravagance of a space of reasons (Wilfried Sellars) ever emerged in
the first place, why it is that, for the subjects themselves, beliefs and
actions are linked to reasons. Why do we have to demand justifications
from one another? What purpose is served by having a superstructure of
agencies that drill into children causally superfluous habits of this sort?
12

John Searle has raised a powerful evolutionary objection to this type of
epiphenomenalism: The processes of conscious rationality are such an
important part of our lives, and above all such a biologically expensive
part of our lives, that it would be unlike anything we know in evolution if
a phenotype of this magnitude played no functional role at all in the life
and survival of the organism.
13


(3) Reductionist strategies are open, moreover, to the further question as
to whether one or the other of the epistemic perspectives can really
simply be dispensed with, or whether we are, from the outset, dependent
on the complementary interlocking of these two ways of disclosing the
world for us. To say that there is no retreating behind the dualism of
epistemic perspectives means only that the corresponding language
games and patterns of explanation cannot be reduced to one another.
Thoughts, which we can express in mentalistic terms, do not admit of
being translated without semantic remainder into empiricist terms
tailored to things and events. This is the crux for those research

10
G.H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1971), part 2; on this see A. Wellmer, Georg Henryk von Wright ber Erklren und
Verstehen, Philosophische Rundschau 26 (1979), 1-27, here 4ff.
11
In this regard, Gerhard Roth is consistent; see, e.g., Roth (2003), 527: In contrast
how everyday psychology see matters, it is not logical arguments as such [emphasis in
the original] that drive us to act reasonably but rather the thought of the associated
consequences, which appear negative or positive.
12
The explanations that Roth offers (2003, pp. 538ff.) are strangely tautological: the
question, after all, is why the illusion of free will emerged, if it plays no causal role.
13
Searle, Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology. [German 2004, p. 50] The
biological reasons that Singer (2004, /// p. 253f.) gives for the differentiation of a
conscious level of decision-making would be conclusive only on the assumption that the
sense of freedom, as the expression of rational action, is not an illusion.
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 7
traditions that must accomplish precisely that, if they are to be able reach
their goal of naturalizing the mind according to established scientific
standards.
14
The translations these theories attempt either tacitly live off
the meaning of the mentalistic expressions they are supposed to replace
or they miss essential aspects of the initial phenomenon and thus yield
misleading re-definitions.

The idea that the language games tailored to the mental and the physical
cannot be reduced to one another raises the interesting question as to
whether we must employ both perspectives simultaneously if we are to
be able to learn something about the world. Clearly the observer
perspective, to which the empiricist perspective limits itself, must be
combined with that of participants in communicative and social practices,
in order to give socialized subjects like us cognitive access to the world.
We are observers and communicative participants in one person.

Truth claims must withstand both the test of experience and of others
objections regarding the authenticity of ones own experience or ones
interpretation thereof. Here matters are no different in the scientific
enterprise than in everyday life.
15
Concept and intuition, construction
and discovery, interpretation and experience these are moments that
cannot be isolated from one another in the research process either.
Experimental observations are significantly prestructured by the choice of
a theory-motivated design. They can serve as an independent check only
to the extent that they count as arguments and can be defended vis--vis
opponents.
16
It is this intersubjective testing of subjective self-evidence
that first makes possible the progressive objectivation of nature. That is
why processes of reaching mutual understanding cannot be put entirely
on the object side, cannot, that is, be described completely as
determined within this world and thus drawn into the domain of
objectivating descriptions.
17


In deterministically tracing all mental events back to the causal
interaction between brain and environment and in denying the space of
reasons the power to intervene, reductionism seems to proceed no less
dogmatically than idealism, which sees the power of reason at work in all

14
Compare V. Descombes, The Minds Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2001) and W. Cramm, Reprsentation oder Verstndigung? Eine Kritik
naturalistischer Philosophien der Bedeutung und des Geistes (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Frankfurt/M, 2003).
15
On this issue, see L. Wingert, Die eigenen Sinne und die fremde Stimme, in M. Vogel
and L. Wingert (eds.), Wissen zwischen Entdeckung und Konstruktion (Frankfurt/M:
Suhrkamp, 2003), 218-49; Wingert, Epistemisch ntzliche Konfrontationen mit der
Welt, in L. Wingert and K. Gnther (eds.), Die ffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die
Vernunft der ffentlichkeit (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2001), 77-105.
16
Wingert (2003), 240.
17
See here the classic i.e., still instructive 1960 article by W. Sellars, Philosophy
and the Scientific Image of Man, in his Science, Perception, and Reality (Atascadero, CA:
Ridgeview, 1991), 1-40.
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 8
natures processes. Bottom-up monism is more scientific than top-down
monism only in its procedure, not in its conclusions.

In light of these alternatives, it becomes more attractive to consider a
form of perspectival dualism that extricates our sense of freedom from
the currently established standards of natural sciences, though not, to be
sure, from the broader perspective of natural evolution. From our
anthropocentric standpoint, both vocabularies and modes of explanation,
which we impose on the world, remain for us inescapable. This explains
the stability of our sense of freedom in the face of natural sciences
determinism. On the other hand, we can consider the organically rooted
mind to be an entity within the world only as long as we avoid attributing
a kind of a priori validity to these two complementary forms of knowing.
We have to find room for epistemic dualism within the world itself. It
must have emerged within an evolutionary learning process and proven
itself in homo sapienss cognitive confrontation with the challenges of a
risky environment.
18
On this assumption it is the continuity of natural
evolution that bridges the epistemic gap between nature (as objectivated
by the natural sciences) and culture (which is always already intuitively
understood because it is intersubjectively shared), thereby securing the
unity of the universe to which humans belong as natural beings.

(4) From a pragmatist perspective that aspires to reconcile Kant with
Darwin, the thesis of inescapability suggests that the complementary
interdependence of epistemic perspectives, deeply rooted in human
nature, emerged at the same time as the cultural form of life itself. The
vulnerability of the biologically immature newborn and the
correspondingly long period of nurturance make humans, from the very
first moment, dependent on social interactions that penetrate deeper into
the organization and character of our cognitive capacities than any other
species. Starting early in life, humans social existence affects learning
and cognitive development through communicative socialization. Michael
Tomasello highlights the socio-cognitive capacity (already emphasized by
G.H.Mead), to perceive and understand members of the same species as
intentionally acting beings,
19
as the evolutionary achievement that
separates homo sapiens from its closest relatives and makes cultural
development possible.
20


Primates can act intentionally and distinguish social objects from
inanimate objects, but for them other primates are still social objects,
that is, objects in the literal sense, since they neither take the perspective

18
Regarding this Kantian pragmatism see my introduction to J. Habermas, Truth and
Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
19
G.H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); on
this, see J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987), 1-42.
20
With regard to the following, see M. Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human
Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 9
of the other nor recognize the other as an alter ego. They do not
understand the other as an intentional actor in a way that allows them to
forge commonalities that are intersubjective in the strict sense, whereas
prelingistic nine-month-old children already learn to direct their attention
together with their caregiver toward the same object. A shared
perspective, which already emerges at this early stage out of the proto-
relationship of a first person to a second person, is constitutive for the
objectivating, distancing take on the world and on oneself as well.
21
On
the basis of social understanding, ones coping with the physical
environment comes to depend on ones cognitive interaction with one
another. The interweaving of the perspective of an observer of what is
going on in the world with the perspective of a participant in interaction
socializes the cognition of the developing child with his fellow humans.

Whereas chimpanzees do not point things out or teach things to other
members of their species, human beings learn by instruction as well as
cooperation. In their dealings with existing cultural artifacts they
discover for themselves the functions instantiated in them. The traditions,
rituals, and tool use that can also be observed in chimps reveal nothing in
the way of intersubjectively shared cultural background knowledge.
Without intersubjectivity of understanding, no objectivity of knowledge.
Without the reorganizing linkage of the subjective mind [Geist] (and its
natural substratum, the brain) to an objective mind [Geist], that is, to
symbolically stored collective knowledge, there are no propositional
attitudes towards a world from which we have gained the kind of distance
that allows for objectivation. Nor would there be any of the technical
achievements in coping with an objectivated world of that sort. Only
socialized brains, linked up with a cultural milieu, carry forward those
accelerating, cumulative learning processes that have been largely
uncoupled from the genetic mechanism of natural evolution.

(5) Of course, neurobiology also takes into account the role of culture and
socialization in cognition. Wolf Singer, for example, distinguishes the
innate knowledge that is stored in the genes and embodied in the human
brains genetically determined default code from individually acquired and
culturally stored knowledge. Society and culture clearly influence the
brain, structuring it well into adolescence and increasing its efficiency in
the further course of ones life. Then why shouldnt there be, in parallel
with the determination of subjective mind by the brain, mental
causation as well, in the sense of the brain being programmed by
objective mind? However, owing to the inescapability of the
complementarily interlinked epistemic perspectives, this idea runs into a
serious problem: we dont know how to conceive of something like
mental causation.


21
Tomasello (2001) [German edition, p. 110]
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 10
Our cognitive apparatus seems ill prepared to understand how the
deterministic causal connections between neuronal synapses can interact
with cultural programming, which we experience as motivation by
reasons. To put this in Kantian terminology: it is incomprehensible how
natural causation and causation through freedom can mutually affect
each other. For if we treat the programming we have been discussing as
a form of natural causation, something essential gets lost the reference
to reasons and conditions of validity, without which propositional content
and propositional attitudes remain unintelligible.
22


We obscure our view of a possible solution when we present the mind as
a substance, as something intelligible, and then proceed to ask
ironically how this immaterial mental entity can interact with brain
processes.
23
In fact, something like the mind only exists due to its
embodiment in acoustically or visually perceivable signs, the material
substrates of symbols, that is, in observable action and communicative
utterances, in symbolic objects or artifacts. Alongside propositionally
differentiated language, the heart of cultural forms of life, there are many
other symbolic media and rule systems, whose semantic content is
intersubjectively shared and reproduced. We can consider these symbol
systems as emergent properties that emerged with the evolutionary leap
into the socialization of cognition.

In order not to misconstrue the ontological status of objective mind
[Geist] that is, of mind that is symbolically embodied in signs, practices,
and objects two aspects are important. On the one hand, objective
mind emerged out of the interaction between the brains of intelligent
animals who had already developed the capacity for reciprocal
perspective-taking; and it reproduces itself only via the communicative
and social practices of these brains, now at a new level of interaction.
On the other hand, objective mind claims relative independence vis--
vis these individuals, since the universe of intersubjectively shared
meaning, organized according to its own grammar, has taken on symbolic
form. These meaning systems can, in turn, influence the brains of
participants via grammatical rules. It is only in the course of the
socialization of human brains and their cognitive capacities that the
subjective mind of those individual participants in shared practices
develops. This is what we call the self-understanding of a subject who
can step into the public space of a shared culture. As actors, they
develop the awareness of being able to act one way or another, because
they are confronted, in the public space of reasons, with validity claims
that challenge them to take up a position.


22
L. Wingert, Die Schere im Kopf. Grenzen der Naturalisierung, in Geyer (2004), 155-
8.
23
Singer (2004), 239f.
Habermas, Freedom and Determinism, page 11
The talk of the mind programming the brain evokes metaphors from
computer language. The computer analogy puts us on the wrong track
insofar as it suggests the Cartesian model of isolated monads, each of
which develops its own inner representation of the external world.
What is missing here is the socialization of cognition that distinguishes
the human mind. But its not programming that is the mistaken
metaphor. Clearly, at the evolutionary level of human nature and culture,
what emerges from the intensified interaction among members of the
same species is a symbolically materialized layer of intersubjectively
shared, grammatically organized meanings. Although the physiology of
the brain does not permit a distinction between software and hardware,
the objective mind can, in contrast to subjective mind, gain the power to
structure the individual brain. Wolf Singer himself speaks of an early
imprinting of the brain that coincides with language acquisition.

The individual brain seems to acquire, via ontogenetic routes, the
necessary dispositions for linking up with the program of society and
culture. It does not encounter the physical environment directly in the
symbolically expressed propositional content of signs. Rather, the
confrontation with the physical environment is mediated by symbolically
stored collective knowledge that was been built up out of the joint
cognitive accomplishments of previous generations. Via physical
properties of the transmitted signals, a grammatically organized universe
of meanings discloses itself to the brain (now mutated into subjective
mind) and demarcates the space of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld
from a henceforth objectivated environment, that is, the objective world.
And it is in this space of reasons that the formation of conscious
judgment and action occurs the very process which is constitutive for
our performative awareness of freedom.

The I can be understood as a social construction, but that doesnt make
it an illusion. In the consciousness of the I, one finds reflected, as it
were, the individual brains link to cultural programs. These programs are
reproduced only through social communication, branching out over the
communicative roles of speaker, addressee, and observer. The
reciprocally exchangeable roles of the first, second, and third person also
support the individuating embedding of the single organism in the public
space of reasons, where socialized individuals take a stand on validity
claims and can act deliberately and thus freely, as the responsible
authors of their own actions.