Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 12:02:21 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: HAB: Dialectics and Science


Good on you, Kris.  Your questions, at once basic and sophisticated, force
us to articulate stuff some of us have never been asked / asked ourselves
to articulate before.  So I'm going to take advantage. I'd like to take a
route through Marx in response to your question about dialectics.  Let's
look at the 'science' that threatens to kill us more surely than even
Oppenheimer's discipline: Economics.  This applies the natural science
method to people (and one could go on about that for an hour - Are we iron
filings? Is that interest rate hike then a magnet?  Nope, and nope.  But I
digress)

Anyway, at the heart of the method is empiricism.  One sees, as Adam Smith
saw, individuals executing transactions with each other, competing with
other individuals as both buyer and seller, to maximise their own utility. 
Empirically, this is a fact.  It thus constitutes a tenable premise for
deduction.  And we have a science.

Dialectically speaking, this is not a universal fact, but a
*universalised*, and *universalising* fact. Marxism, whence comes, I think,
the general notion of dialectics Habermas entertains (but not quite the
particular - I might get to that), has it that human history brings into
being and out of being such apparently timeless truths.  If I may quote
Marx, from *The German Ideology*:

'the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all
eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the
state of society; and, indeed, (a product) in the sense that it is a
historical product.'

So we have the corporeal and the ideational perpetually interacting. 
Scientific facts are such because they are validated by a way of seeing
that is conditioned by the prevalent mode of human organisation.  This way
of seeing reproduces and transforms that mode, which in turn reproduces or
transforms the way of seeing.  

We may perceive a prehistoric community going about its business very much
in the mode of 'homo economicus' described above.  It may not yet have
discovered the truth about itself as economics now knows it, but the fact
is universal so that's what they were and that's how they were thinking. 
But dialectics has it that this is neither what they were being (scientism
as ontology fails the dialectics test) nor, concomitantly, how they were
thinking (0/1 for epistemology too).  

Jameson is one Marxist who would claim that what we're actually
contemplating here is a state of primitive communism - where humans think
of themselves not so much as member of the collective (a notion some of us
can still (just) grasp) but as *the collective*.  No, I can't grasp it
either; our historically contingent system of meaning prevents our grasping
it (Marx, Gadamer and Habermas would, I think, be at one on this).  

So the old story that Marx was an economic determinist is but a canard:

'Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real,
active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their
productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these ...'

Notice Marx uses the word 'conditioned', not 'determined' - because the
latter term is, I think, redolent of the sort of linear empiricism that
both Marx and Habermas critique.

To return to your point.  You quote Habermas:

'the venerable transcendental and dialectical modes of justification may still
come in handy. All they can fairly be expected to furnish, however, is
reconstructive hypotheses for use in empirical settings'

and wonder whether this contradicts McCarthy's claim that

"A systematic and theoretically adequate account of the relation of theory
to practice, one capable of countering the hegemony of scientism on all
fronts, is still outstanding. Meeting this need has been an abiding concern
of Habermas's work."

Given the above, let's look at McCarthy's assertion first.  What Habermas
says about science is that it is but one way of seeing; and a way far too
privileged in this day and age.  We're not iron filings (an appropriate
object of science); we are reasoning beings, who review our thoughts and
actions (we are 'reflexive'), or at least have the capacity to do so - for
Habermas this alone renders human society an inappropriate object for
science.  What brings him to this position is, I submit, a quasi-Marxist
dialectic sensibility.

For Habermas, the instrumental rationality that is basic to scientism (a
term he uses to describe the arrogant application of 'scientific'
assumptions and categories where they don't belong - and transform objects
of their analysis into something they are not ['reductionism' and
'reification' are two words you'll come across in this connection]) is one
of three 'knowledge constitutive interests' (*Knowledge and Human
Interests*, 1968).

The other two are practical rationality and emancipatory rationality.  The
former refers to our capacity for symbolic interaction (human
communication).  We all possess, as humans, communicative competence that
allows us to attain understanding (ie. *not* to persuade or manipulate -
these are manifestations of instrumental, or scientific, rationality) but
*understanding*, as the recognised requirement for *real* agreement.  A
mischievous critic might point out we can agree without understanding and
understand without agreeing - the two are not inextricably linked in that
sense - but that's not the issue here.

The third knowledge-constitutive interest, the emancipatory, refers to the
humanist proposition that people wish for freedom from domination.  For
Habermas, scientism (the hegemonic predominance of instrumental
rationality) is the salient mode of domination from which we should be
trying to extricate ourselves.

When Habermas sees a role for dialectical thinking in positing
'reconstructive hypotheses in empirical settings', he is saying something
quite dramatic, I think.  For the settings in which we find ourselves are
apprehended by us as empirical settings.  We must see them thus.  I think
Habermas would agree with the Marxist in me that dialectics not only has
the potential to uncover the reality behind the appearance, but allows real
human agency - the possibility that we arrive at emancipatory conclusions
by way of communicative action.  

We are not only the object of history, we are the subject of history.

Cheers,
Rob




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