Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 14:22:36 -0500
From: Scott Johnson <sjohn-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us>
Subject: Re: HAB: habermas's nihilism


Ken wrote:

> the corrective, i think, lies within 
> the notion that we articulate our views, without limits, from our understanding of 
> ourselves and our traditions while acknowledging that these sources of our identity 
> cannot simply be held as authoritative and unquestionable.  the arguments that are 
> sure to follow then procede without appeals to authority or faith rather to "good 
> reasons."

Since neither the traditions nor anything else can be considered really
authoritative and unquestionable, to what do we appeal in questioning
them? What is a "good reason"? There is *something* to which you are
commited, but at the same time you want to remain infinitely uncommited.
What can that something be? Something outside of "yourself and your
traditions?" Something right outside of history and actuality? Hardly.
When we question traditions we reflect on them according to their own
immanent criteria, we discover what we "really meant by all that." It is
according to an already existent commitment, something that we for the
moment hold as authoritative and unquestionable, that we can judge
anything. Your comment reminded me of Wayne Booth's argument in his
"Rhetoric of Irony" against the fashionable idea of total irony, where
he pointed out that to say that the perfectly ironic has no moral point
of view is faulty, because when one pursues that as a goal one takes a
moral stand against moral stands. 
   I like to think of Habermas as trying to uncover real normative
commitments by putting them in action, since to merely reflect on them
cannot give us anything which can be potentially different that our
current conception of those commitments. That is, we reflect on
ourselves when our commitments are revealed in action, in their actual
exercise. The distinction between the cognitive/instrumental and
moral/practical has the import of showing that the latter is something
else entirely from the former, in that its rationality lies in a
reflexivity which refers not to states of affairs which can exist apart
>from communication, but to a reality which is irreducibly "between us",
and thus is simply not available to a "monological" approach. From this
point of view, in advocating the "notion that we articulate our views,
without limits, from our understanding of ourselves and our traditions
while acknowledging that these sources of our identity cannot simply be
held as authoritative and unquestionable" you fail to recognize the
already shared commitments which motivate your assertion, and you also
fail to recognize the expectation you have that others will consider
your point of view in that assertion to be persuasive and legitimate.
The nature of this ground is such that it cannot be "viewed" as a whole
>from a theoretical point of view. I think of Habermas as pointing out
THAT this ground exists, and not WHAT it is. The performative
contradiction reveals your practical (and, Habermas says, formal)
commitment its existence EVEN IN DENYING IT. My difference with Habermas
is in characterizing this ground. He tends, I think, too far towards the
transcendental in trying to avoid historicism. Instead of going too far
in the OTHER direction, I favor a Hegelian conception which tries to put
the two back together again. 

Scott
-- 
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* Scott Johnson        e-mail sjohn-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us * 
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"...How can Quine expect universal consent on anything 
in any language-using community that allows for the 
existence of [Kenneth MacKendrick]?" --Victor Scheff



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