Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 17:26:44 -0600
From: Scott Johnson <sjohn-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us>
Subject: Re: Habermas and Emotions


Noelle McAfee wrote:

> In my reading of Habermas, so long as agreement occurs among particular
> others it is only conventional agreement not moral agreement, which
> requires agreement from an unlimited communication community.  This is a
> universal community, not a particular community of concrete others.  I
> think that's Benhabib's point.
> 

When those who agree are "all concerned" the agreement is as universal
as it can concretely be. To ask for more, to take more as a standard, is
to develope an abstraction, to demand a transcendent truth. If later it
becomes apparent that in this or that particular sphere the issues
transcend such a  limited sphere (that generalizable interests are
involved somehow) then the discourse naturally widens as the earlier
agreement is questioned. Habermas doesn't have to be read as posing an
abstract universality to which an equally abstract particularity can be
posed, rather I think that discourse, as Habermas conceives it, is where
universality and particularity meet. The same normative speech act is
both universal and particular at the same time in that the claim (indeed
the language itself) transcends the individual while still being truly
motivating, not an alien "ought". I'm sympathetic to these criticisms of
Habermas (in fact Steve can attest to the fact that I can get pretty
heated up in arguing along just those lines), but if Habermas does tend
to lean to far toward Kantian liberalism, he at the same time points
beyond this old dichotomy of universality and particularity. 

I hope to post something which can expand on some of this, but I've been
unable to get it together lately. Soon....

Scott Johnson
Duluth, MN