Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 16:07:26 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: Re: HAB: Dialectics and Science


G'day listers,

Thanks to Rakesh Bhandari, who provided the marxism-international list with
this apposite quote from Wisman:

>"Mainstream economics, in its positivistic and instrumental orientation,
>pretends to be principally concerned with discovering regularities and
>correlations within the economic order whichmigh permit greater prediction
>and control of economic phenomena. However, its uncritical stance, combined
>with its pretence of ethical neutrality, has precluded attempts to
>differentiate those regularities and correlations representing invariant
>forms of social life from those which merely 'express ideologically frozen
>relations of dependence that in principle can be transformed' (Habermas,
>1971) Regularities which represent the ideological imprisonment of human
>make predictions of social phenomena more likely. Indeed, the more firmly
>ideology is entrenched, the greater will be the predictive power. Such
>predictions can become powerful instruments for control and manipulation of
>society by the state or private centres of concentrated power."
>
>Jon D Wisman, 1991. "The scope and goals of economic science: A Habermasian
>perspective". In Economics and Hermeneutics, ed. Donald Lavoie. New York:
>Routledge. 113-

Cheers,
Rob.
______________________________________________________________________________

>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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