Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 15:52:57 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas and Social Action


Thanks for this, Michael.  I think I'm clearer on the thrust of what you
were saying now.

You write:

>Yes but the Neo-Kantian dimension of Habermas lies in the idea of a wholly
>cognitivist / formalist / universalist /justice-centred discourse ethics in
>which one half of some pretty traditional dualisms seems to trump its other
>half, combined with some exemplary out-hegeling of hegelian dialecitical
>overcoming of fact / norm, legal positivism/natural law, liberal/republican
>is/ought, fact/value, empirical / normative legal theory,
>hermeenuetical/system theory dualisms. My argument is that Habermas BOTH
>overcomes and reinstates different either/or dualisms, e.g.,
>contextualist/universalist and that only the overcoming moment is compatable
>with the earlier critical theory. His contribution to the "postivist dispute"
>text strikes me as a pretty clear and insightful view of dialectics. A
>curious thing about BFN is that the dialectical aspects stand out most
>clearly in the later postscript. Perhaps, Habermas seems at his least
>dialectical when he is at his most overtly "philosophical"

This has excited me into a long post - sorry.  For a start, here's my take
on Habermas the philosophical universalist:

If philosophy constitutes the positing of an internally coherent metaphysic
- establishing parameters for both theory of being and necessarily
concomitant way of seeing - then Michael has cause for his suspicion - this
does not seem a dialectical proposition.  This does not mean that the
universal does not play a role in historical dialectics (as opposed to an
all-encompassing 'dialectical materialism' view of the world - one which
neither Marx nor Habermas needed to take or did, in fact, take).  I guess I
think Habermas does posit a universal category.  I agree with Rorty that he
has to do this because the problem posed by the postmodernist (Lyotardian)
'incredulity toward narratives' is that unmasking only makes sense if we
'preserve at least one standard for the explanation of the corruption of
all reasonable standards'.

Habermas is effectively saying that abandoning an overarching standard of
ideal emancipation would be irrationalist: 

'because it drops the notions which have been used to justify the various  
    reforms which have marked the history of the Western democracies since
the Enlightenment ... Abandoning a standpoint which is, if not
transcendental, at least 'universalistic', seems to Habermas to betray the
social hopes which have been central to liberal politics.' 

In short, we would lose:

'the internal theoretical dynamic which constantly propels the sciences -
and the self-reflexion of the sciences as well - beyond the creation of
merely technologically exploitable knowledge.'

If the metanarrative in question is subject to its historical instance, its
social context, its specific linguistic parameters and prevailing
discourses, well, so be it.  You can only get as true as you can get. 
Worrying about whether this truth is absolute in some unrealistic
scientistic sense is a waste of time.  Habermas seeks what authenticity is
available to him; that which is currently sensible.

Philosophically, there may be room both for metanarratives ('universal'
truths as sought by Habermas) and their negation (the post-modernist
scepticism of, inter alia, Lyotard).  Practically, the former offers the
rationale for, and the possibility of, social democratic reform, albeit
within a scope delimited by prevailing discourse, and the latter flounders
in its readings of recent history as autonomous blocs, each characterised
by profound and tragic discrepancies between contemporary teleologies and
their consequences.  The post-modernist's contribution has been the warning
that revolutionary change is dangerous and insensitive to the fundamentally
a priori human differences pomos base their skepticism upon, and that the
complexity of human life is such that only piecemeal reform is possible
(Lyotard).  Pomos are philosophical radicals and practical conservatives.

Lyotard leaves us nothing with which to justify or inform reform  and
Habermas offers a faith in human development based on the rationality of
emancipation.  This is the sensibility that moved Habermas to call
modernism 'an unfinished project'.  In that sense I must declare myself a
recalcitrant modernist.  In the sense that modernism may be read as
uncritical historicism and instrumentalist scientism, as Lyotard seems to
read it, not even Habermas, the proudly self-styled modernist, need qualify
as such.

I think White (intro in the Cambridge Companion to Habermas) has it right
when he sums up Habermas's project as follows:

... to elaborate how the communicative approach to reason and action helps
us both to critique certain aspects of modernity and yet to clarify the
value of other aspects in such a way as to give us some grounds for
'self-reassurance'.
For me, Habermas's focus on human society as a communicative entity allows
a minimally contentious but fundamentally necessary point of departure: the
notion of intersubjectivity.  There is no Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman/Maggie
Thatcher-type individual and there is no Lenin/Mussolini/Pol Pot-type
collectivity - just this effectively normative but essentially human appeal
to freedom, as it can be understood in space and time:

'public autonomy is reconceived as the availability of a differentiated
'network' of communicative arrangements for the discursive formation of
public opinion and will; and a system of basic individual 'rights provides
exactly the conditions under which the forms of communication necessary for
a politically autonomous constitution of law can be institutionalised'.'

We are who we are, with the emancipatory promise we have, because of the
way we communicate as a whole.  Yet we can only be this collective if
individual rights exist sufficiently to allow the public raising and
validation of arguments.  No more dichotomy between public and private - so
no insistence on one to the exclusion of the other.  A minimalist modernist
position if ever there was one.  But still modernist - and more strength to
Jurgen's arm!

I am straying all over the place, but I guess I'm saying that Habermas the
universalist is not necessarily incompatible with Habermas the
dialectician.  I just don't think Habermas would make sense to me if a
modest humanism wasn't at work in a dialectical process of social
reproduction/transformation.

If you're still reading; thanks.  Do I need putting right?

Cheers,
Rob.




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