File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_1997/habermas.9708, message 23


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







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