Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 21:53:56 -0400 From: "kenneth.mackendrick" <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca> Subject: Re: HAB: Communicative and Strategic Rationality > Ken, Ken, Ken....*sigh*. Lets talk irony, then. I suppose you haven't > read Wayne Booth's _Rhetoric of Irony_, but he argues very convincingly that irony involves "presuppositions about who that other is." When those presuppositions turn out to be false in any given case, the irony is not understood. No, i haven't - your supposition is correct. I agree with what you have said here - irony is an expression of local reason - we have no quarrel here - unless you dismiss irony as having cognitive or rational content. Now, I don't know what you have in mind with your > reference to "a universalist sense", but these presuppositions are both concrete AND are extended to one's interlocutor in a way in which it is expected that the interlocutor SHOULD understand (in other words, both the moments of particularity and universality are present). Notice in your characterization of Habermas's conception of language as two-tiered that strategic interaction could correspond to the cognitive/instrumental sphere and communicative interactive to the > moral/practical. In that case, it seems that what you want to explore would fall under the heading of therapeutic speech, which correspond to the aesthetic/expressive sphere. Habermas doesn't really concern himself > with as this much as the others (see David Ingram's _Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason_), and it has been argued that the therapeutic model may be more important than Habermas credits (see Bernstein's _Recovering Ethical Life_.) Yes - but i think it can be demonstrated that these aesthetic-expressive spheres overlap with objective and social spheres - what kind of world would we live in if they didn't?!!?? Bernstein makes this point (I haven't read Ingram yet). But what i am getting at shifts beyond therapeutic models. The empathic idea of communication is one that encompasses the idea of truth and rightness within the particular in which it finds itself - it maks how the three elements find themselves entwined in actual use - and it also accounts for the role of desire, humanity, in the drive for truth, rightness, of truthfulness - and the drive for reason - which cannot be accounted for in itself. >But in any case, the way has already been partly > traversed, and it might be a good idea to pick up from there. > I can't help but point out that the sort of thing you want to > emphasize is a traditional Romantic preserve (art and the aesthetic making "public" or expressing that which cannot be conceptualized.) What public are you talking about? The public sphere is not a sphere that actually exists - what habermas understands as private i understand to be public... the dynamic of the two spheres is one of mutuality - in which they cannot meaningfully be defined - without reifying the experience of either. In this way - the public/private divide does not exist except as a conceptual framework. > Now, Habermas characterizes the problem of > modernity as being one of an overemphasis on strategic/instrumental rationality at the expense of communicative. I prefer Taylor in that he > includes not just the Enlightenment strain, but the Romantic as well. Taylor divides these things like football teams of the enlightenment - with Nietzche on one side and Habermas (or Gadamer) on the other. I do not thing these can be divided in the same way. > >From this perspective the dimension that Habermas has neglected is incorporated, without going overboard and giving priority to the aesthetic/expressive. I think that communicative interaction includes both the the reflective moment of disengagement AND the unreflective moment of engaged expression. Modernity is a diremption of the > communicative unity into autonomous Enlightenment and Romantic spheres which both claim too much for themselves. The task is to recover a communicative interaction that incorporates the gains of this diremption, but corrects it as well. Perhaps the problem can be phrased in this way - critical theory is reflection. Habermas's theory of communicative rationality is an attempt to put this element of reflection into practical terms. Emphatic reason is not just a way of knowing (as critical theory is) but a way of living. For Habermas rationality is a club which knocks people over the head - hence it is enforced by the power of law. Emphatic reason is a way of relating to things in a nonviolent way - and cannot be reduced to the "rational" coercive effect of law nor the means-ends aspect of strategy. ... Isn't this > all a problem because the two are not integrated in a sphere of communicative action? And wouldn't this integration have to be a higher integration which retained the now-autonomous moments? Aren't we in > Hegel's territory here? Yes - we are all in Hegel's territory... aside from that - i do not think that habermas's understanding of rationality can be maintained. his (U) is incoherent because it creates normativity, conceptually, out of itself. This kind of creation out of nothing rips apart the fabric in which we live. We don't reason in a vacuum. Something beyond the totality of reason exists within reason itself. For example - if we take the idea of reason and try to define it we will not come to an agreement about everything. The concept is based upon the word and the word upon the concept - which is different, in various respects, for everyone in a pluralistic universe. In this way something else is included in the idea of reason. What is this "extra"? - this element of nonidenity which escapes our logic? Whence come rational dissent against rationality? If enlightenment is an ongoing process then reason, in its own measure, cannot be defined or totalized. The idea of emphatic reason descibes a way of knowing put into form in our expressions, our drama, and our living - however it takes shape. ken "testing a hypothesis" mackendrick --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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