Date: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 02:18:48 -0800 Subject: HAB: What makes citizenship compelling, beyond emancipatory values, Discourse? Continuing from where I left off, at “HAB: Being exemplary in the neighborhood.II,” 10/13 (a subject line that was not intended to be self-referential! Rather it indicates the interface of “ethical” and “moral” interests.).... Up to page 7 of “Employments...” (page 7)--not that I’m going to plod through every paragraph of this essay!--the merit of the moral outlook is an appeal to political-systemic exemplarity, inasmuch as one’s own actions may have political meaning or consequences. Not only is this a plausible interpretation of Habermas’ differentiation of a moral interest from an ethical interest in practical reason (that reflects his general career interest in what’s political); but it could be that no so-called “moral” interest has *valid* meaning other than as some version of the democratic interest (apart from variously ethical meanings). Generally (beyond “Employments” for a moment), one is not only in a citizen position of approving or rejecting acts of power that have broad consequences (speaking Truth *to* Power). *Basically*, the moral outlook claims that its value is compelling for any “one’s” own life; the value of citizenship--political responsibility and political accountability--belongs to every “one” as *duty*, as well as right; not only is citizenship an entitlement, it is a duty. But what makes this claim compelling? What makes the “command” of moral duty motivating? Someone who doesn’t find this outlook--this duty-imposing value--compelling is said to be provincial; from the point of view of the moral outlook, to not find the political implications of one’s life regulative in one’s deliberations *is* what it means to be provincial or ethically self-limited (if not oppressed or / and deluded). But why would someone who is *overtly* apolitical in their activity (or thinking)—being non-“political” in the systemic-regulative sense--*care* whether enthused democratic parties see their “ethical” lives as provincial? Given that being exemplary in one’s neighborhood of choice (extended family, work, organizational memberships) is important in itself, for reasons that Habermas grants are “ethical,” is the moral--the democratic--interest more than a call for leadership within neighborhoods for the sake of *pragmatic* interrelations among neighborhoods? The moral interest is at least this; but what more than this can it be? And inasmuch as it *is* at least this, what *is* the duty of s/he, who can be a leading voice, to realize her/his potential as political example? What is the nature of *Self* interest that makes the value of citizenship (if not leadership) compelling and governing over contrary values in-and-for one’s life? I presume that subscribers to this list have immediate thoughts and feelings about why the democratic interest is so *obviously* important--from pragmatic reasoning about how a good world works to essentialist reasoning about our social nature. But, what makes citizen responsibility and accountability *actually* compelling is not easy to ascertain, relative to the low degree of electoral participation in the U.S. generally, the low degree of community activism (outside of crisis Moments and “negative” movements against oppression), and the low marketability of communication that requires extended attention and effort, such as “positive” movements of progressivism. One important dimension of apolitical tendencies in lifeworlds is the character of lived *time*: how (first of all) organizational colonization of a lifeworld drains one’s energy and pre-empts one’s time for reading, thinking, and community participation. But this is a “clinical” matter, best addressed within the context of “ethical” life and one’s emancipatory interest relative to this. How can the moral outlook itself create interest in democratic responsibility and compel political accountability? What guidance can a moral outlook provide for *giving* value to possibilities of citizenship that become governing over contrary values within one’s neighborhood? Without a constructive answer to this kind of questioning, the moral outlook or the democratic interest cannot have any sense of autonomy from ethical life which Habermas claims it has. Indeed, inasmuch as autonomy only emerges *for* lifeworlds, the potential for autonomy *within* ethical life may be the condition for the possibility of the compellingness of the democratic interest relative to other values of one’s life. If the moral outlook is one which, by definition, counterposes itself to an ethically *provincial* or constrained lifeworld, does this make the moral outlook basically emancipatory? Inasmuch as this *is* the case (there is compelling evidence in Habermas’ career that an emancipatory interest is advanced by the practical interest), how can the moral outlook ground its emancipatory potential for educing one’s *general* or democratic interest, except in terms of the ethical life that “must” be motivated to act politically in a committed, long-term way? Yet, the moral outlook is not *primarily* emancipatory, except inasmuch as one conceives the democratic interest as primarily emancipatory, which is a mistake (as the history of the Left attests so well). Rather, the democratic interest has *always* idealized itself in terms of the realization of human potential, beyond liberation from *imposed* oppression and crisis. Habermas aside, where can *anyone* find post-emancipatory, “positive” potential for realizing *ideals* of democracy associated with advancing human potential, beyond necessary entitlement to “negative” freedom (or liberty), if not in the pre-oppressive (childhood) and pre-critical (pre-crisis-driven) desire of a person for self-realization? But, then, what is the character of self-realization that happily grants the democratic interest a governing place in one’s life? Inasmuch as an emancipatory point of view as inherent to the moral outlook of practical reason (even if not exhausitve of the moral outlook), does “moral” urgency shrink in importance as ethical life matures in some yet-unclarified but clarifiable sense (a sense one would pursue with Habermas in terms of Kohlbergian “moral” development)? The moral outlook--which is basically counterpoised by Habermas against ethical egoism (next paragraph below)--could be rhetorically codependent on ethical underdevelopment, in the Kohlbergian sense. This is not the kind of thing that Habermas has ever articulated (as far as I know), but it accords with the broadest horizon of his career. Apart from ethical life (differentiated in a modern sense, as I outlined earlier, and will return to) and apart from an emancipatory interest, the moral outlook seems all the more to be only the democratic interest in valid governance, which very many persons find non-binding. * * * Looking at the moral outlook as at least an emancipatory interest is not only compelled by Habermas’ longstanding sense of the practical interest of knowledge, but is also suggested indirectly by Habermas in “Employments” --remaining “True” to his earlier sense of practical reason--when he *directly* counterposes the categorical imperative to egocentrism: “A categorical imperative...first signals a break with the egocentric character of the golden rule...”(8). But what is *compelling* about this “signal”? In traditional fashion, Habermas notes that “only a maxim that can be [validly] generalized...can command assent and to that extent is worthy of recognition...”(8), which is the valid condition of legislated regulation. That rationale which is worthy of such recognition is, “in other words,... morally binding” (8). “[W]hat *one* ought to do” is that which is in accordance with legitimate regulations; the modifer ‘moral’ seems irrelevant. A rationale which is worthy of recognition is, for *that* reason, governing or “binding” on action, whether legislated, factual, or self-reflective in a life-centered sense. What reason is there to consider that “moral commands” are more than this: pragmatic regulatives that are compelling by reason of “my” identification with their reasonableness? Since the moral outlook *is* only the authority of truly democratic imperatives that are only as binding as the degree of one’s identification with their reasonableness relative to one’s own life, how can it be valid to claim that “moral commands are categorical or unconditional imperatives” (8), except inasmuch as some democratically constituted imperatives are unconditionally worthy? What imperatives are--and by whose authority are they--unconditionally worthy of recognition? Granting that moral imperatives are that which they are defined to be (while not being actually imperative by definition!), it’s plausible to claim that there are none that are substantively compelling except *for* an ethical life that is already disposed to *identify with* the conditions of their unconditionality (whatever those turn out to be). And there’s the problem: the *existential* conditions for the possibility of there being unconditionally compelling worthiness. The universalizability of the inherence of reason to communicative action doesn’t imply substantively unconditional results of reason for actual discourses (that take place within particular environments, at particular times in history, relative to various kinds of knowledge that are grasped are various levels of sophistication). All in all, Habermas is anticipating a comprehensive justification for governmental authority that remains to be clarified in terms of a lifeworld’s bredth of sense of its own connection to the rationality of pragmatic arrangements. Such a self-clarification of the compellingness of valid governance remains to be developed in, arguably, three *kinds* of inquiry: political (e.g., _Between Facts and Norms_), philosophical (the discourse ethic as such and formal pragmatics), and ethical (in a differentiated sense, most addressed by his examination of “moral-cognitive” development). Anticipating the political sojourn, Habermas writes: “Moral judgment...serves to clarify legitimate behavioral expectations in response to interpersonal conflicts resulting from the disruption of our orderly coexistence by conflicts of interests” (9). The moral outlook may be not only legislative, not only emancipatory (executive?), but also adjudicative. Yet, its adjudicative calling appears to be only pragmatic, albeit at a systemic level, as a responsive agent of clarification that is *partial* toward common ground. Moral judgment offers “omnipartial” impartiality that, I believe, is no more compelling than its appreciation of the order of coexistence that is disrupted, and the significance of such impartiality can be no greater than what genuinely belongs to that orderly coexistence: possibilies of learning, imaginative identification, healing, and constructiveness that altogether compose the potential of “ethical” life. Could it be that the weight of “moral” judgment is epistemic, not “categorical”? It *stands* for generalizable knowledge about systematic contexts of interaction that, it *claims*, is worthy of consideration in problem solving or that deserves a governing role. Its contributions are proposals for interpretation and organization of action that can be justified *for* co-existential conflicts, not as an imperative over orderly coexistence, but as a participant in conflict that *represents* the standing of available knowledge that is relevant. Yet, judgment that contributes *systematically-tested*, epistemically-grounded precedent *for* the sake of learning, imaginative identification, healing, and constructiveness in the resolution of conflict is compelling only in view of its standing relative to the coexistence it seems to adjudicate, the scale of neighborhood in which the conflict exists. But this relativity--by no means “unconditional”--applies to all knowledge, all judgment, whether in regard to what’s true, what’s regulative for systemic interaction, what deserves to be normative for action, and what is genuinely expressed. What is *”moral”* in judgment still seems to be only what’s in the democratic interest, which is more than likely irrelevant to most conflicts. After all, “legitimate behavioral expectations” pertain to procedural contexts generally--processes of inquiry, organizational arrangements, and professional practices--which can be sufficently understood, I think, in pragmatic and ethical terms, without political import. One could easily disagree that any context is without political import, but justification of that claim is not likely to be compelling by way of “moral” or political advocacy, rather by clarification of strategical, instrumental and pragmatic relations of power that are allegedly inherent to the organization of interaction. Making a conflict resolution a political issue is an option for co-existential conflicts, but an option that has no special merit relative to co-existential conflicts. It seems. A jurisprudential *pragmatic* is not “moral” in any non-pragmatic, non-ethical manner of unconditionality: “Here we are concerned with...reciprocal rights and duties” (9) that can be no more commanding than the facticity of particular laws that need be appropriated, enforced, revised or created. Only the deeply implicit *conditions* of law, vested in a historical discourse of constitutionality, approaches the conceptual neighborhood of unconditionality, but then only *relative* to a previously *constituted* neighborhood (municipality or geographic region of jurisdiction). *Between* neighborhoods is another matter. Here, political discourse *is* faced with its own conditionality, which is fatefully substantive (not unconditional at all): national, international, or humanitarian, and this brings “one” back to, up to, into “ethical” discourse, in a *philosophical* sense (a sense, however, that is not compelling in Kantian terms). In the meantime, much short of a Discourse that is at *once* philosophical, ethical, and political, the moral outlook is at best the face of progressive government. Practical reason lives in a world of ethical lives, campaigns of progressive government, and discursive possibilities of highly principled questioning. The “categoricality” of the moral outlook’s mysterious claim to compellingness is disseminated throughout the domain of legislative, emancipatory, and judicial interests, dramatically “directed to the *free will*, emphatically construed, of a person who acts in accordance with self-given laws...” (9), exemplified by the philosopher. By “emphatically construed,” Habermas means, I think: contrued relative to the expressive validity interest, which is addressed by dramaturgical approaches to communicative action. To say that action is emphatic is just to emphasize one validity claim of genuineness within reasonable action, which Habermas has always recognized in a rigorous sense (but seldom dwelled on): the interest in self presentation that makes a claim (through the expressive component of every speech act, i.e., *“I”* assert that...) to genuineness and which may take up its own standing as the content of its communication, as self presentation. But the *Kantian* advocacy of self, Kant’s claim to exemplarity, is a matter of a specific case of self presentation, independent of formal pragmatic inherence of expressive validity claims in all speech acts or cases made or positions developed--all Standings. Imagine!: “self-given laws.” It is the heart of Kantian freedom: a philosophical insightfulness of ethical leadership. What was It that Kant imagined there to *be* available to all, in acting *for* all “morally” (i.e., for Kant, in accord with categorically given freedom)? Whatever it was--or is, this *self-formativity* of a “person”, this *ethical* potential of action!--“is autonomous in the sense that it is completely open to determination by moral [philosophical-ethical-democratic] insights” (9). What is it to be this way, “completely open” to maximally comprehensive Insight? “Kant confused the autonomous will with an omnipotent will” (10) writes Habermas, “and [Kant] had to transpose it into the intelligible realm in order to conceive of it as absolutely determinative” (10), yet can a *compelling* autonomy be conceived that is *not* confused with an omnipotent will? YES. Something about the “Kantian” imagination remains so compelling for Habermas, that one might think he hopes to transpose its conception into some intelligible realm that is *not* absolutely determinative (unlike Hegel, according to Habermas in _Knowledge and Human Interests_). I believe that this is the case with Habermas: Something about the capacity of human self-formativity is expressed in the Kantian aspiration of free will, which Kant’s time didn’t give him the resources to *validly* articulate, and Habermas (along with Karl Otto-Apel and a few others) have sought to further the possibility of intelligible free will, but in “postmetaphysical” terms of a quasi-transcendental discourse (formal pragmatics) whose ethic is *rigorously* democratic--fundamentally Open, in its epistemic endeavors. Even in the heights of philosophical Standings (also the depths of understanding), “the autonomous will is efficacious only to the extent that it can ensure that the motivational force of good reasons outweighs the power of other motives” (10), outweighing claims, say, to visionary originality whose authority stands in convictions about the authenticity of revelation (in which, I believe, Kant ultimately vested his own beautiful intelligence--an intelligence of Beauty). In the final analysis, Kant is irrelevant. “For Kant practical reason is coextensive with morality” (10) in his categorically willed sense, but for Habermas “there result three different though complementary interpretations of practical reason” (10), and (I think) the singularity of practical reason as such cannot be specified without a scale of attention that comprehends governmental systems and orders of existence discursively, i.e., relative to all the domains of knowledge that are relevant to governmental systems and orders of existence. * * * Habermas writes that “moral-practical discourses...require a break with all of the unquestioned truths of an established, concrete ethical life, in addition to distancing oneself from the contexts of life with which one’s identity is inextricably interwoven” (12). But this applies equally as much to truth-functional discourses and existential discourses; that is, this applies to practical *discourses*, not especially to politically-implicative (or “moral”) discourses. What is the character of the break with unquestioning and the distancing from inextricable interwovenness that is actually general to reasoning and appropriate deliberation? This character does not break with all of the truths of ethical life, in being appropriately reasonable; nor does this character distance itself from all the contexts with which it identifies. Moreover, there’s no reason to believe that practical reason faces simply either concrete life or the interests of All; in between is a gradation of “we”s that may only face the interests of all rarely, and then only relative to systems of pragmatic regulations, as I’ve argued (to perhaps a tiresome degree). Though a “higher-level intersubjectivity” (12) can be clarified--and is most philosophically interesting!--it is misleading to directly associate the usual appropriateness of practical deliberation with the limit conditions under which reason as such takes place. “The higher-level intersubjectivity [is] characterized by an intermeshing of the perspectives of each with the perspectives of all” (12) others who are anticipated to be affected, including those who are available within actual discourses and for real deliberations. But, being *ultimately* “constituted only under the communicative presuppositions of a universal discourse” (12) should not be read as implying a specific or accessible universal discourse as the actual presupposition of practical reason. A universal discourse only makes sense relative to *intergenerational* anticipations about the growth of knowledge and communicative action, which imposes *provisionality* on actual deliberations in direct proportion to the scale of one’s anticipations of the “universe” of affected parties; i.e., the greater the universe of potential affect (be it across contemporary space or across historical time--both ways!: into past precedents and into future advents), the greater the provisionality or range-specificity of actual agreements and decisions. For example, jurisprudential decisions on highly controversial issues tend to be narrow in scope, *because* of the constraints on anticipation of the effects of broadviewed decisions on an evolving circumstance. Scientific generalizations are usually very provisional, always within strictly specified parameters and relative to specific assumptions that are theory-laden with the evolving paradigm of the institutional discourse formation. THE Universe of Discourse is located in social evolution as such; it is the evolutionarity of discourse as such, in which discourse formations (altogether: the University, as a form of life) live and by which the standing of particular discourses *will be* over time evaluated. “This impartial standpoint overcomes the subjectivity of the individual participant’s perspective” (12) *within* deliberation (which is only available to individuals!) *as* the discursive implicature of one’s own values, beliefs, interpretations, and representations. It “breaks” with one’s life and “distances” itself from contexts appropriately--as fits the neighborhood of a problem. But it is not imperative to “impede access to the intuitive knowledge of the lifeworld” (13) in order to be free to take a distanced perspective on it. My sense of the Earth is not impeded by flying above it; rather I get a gestalt of topography that beautifully complements the ground that I’ve traversed by car. “The objectivity of the so-called ideal observer” (13) is, indeed, ideal in an ideal sense, for it instills a disposition toward *scale* of neighborhood (interscale of relativity) that can be out-of-this-world in its belonging to the world as such, and is appealing in itself to anyone who has been brought to “See” it (unless one has conceptual acrophobia, which is appealing in itself to *dispell*!). Discourse in any domain always becomes philosophical, if it proceeds freely long enough. There is a discursive interest that is generalizable over all discourse formations, and it is essentially philosophical. The philosophical interest is the essential human interest in advancing one’s own self understanding of the world as such and of one’s place in the world as a human being. It is the interest that compels an interest in knowing, for its own sake (exemplified by ontogeny, pure science and artistic life); an interest in exploration, regardless of where it may go; an interest in self-clarification, regardless of who or how or what one turns out to essentially be. This is what philosophy has always been, classically and curricularly. Being philosophical in the classical sense doesn’t imply metaphysical stances. Philosophy, in its most academic sense (which can express our evolutionary potential), is always already latent to any indication of discourse. Discourse--not just “moral-practical discourse[, implies] the ideal extension of each individual communication community from within” (13). In discourse, “a common interest of all” always holds the potential of becoming *the* interest of all in realizing and advancing our own nature, however this can be validly characterized. Norms of discourse pertain basically to epistemic claims, whether truth-functional, existential, regulative or meta-discursive (pertaining to a validity claim to comprehensibility that Habermas doesn’t indicate often, but which is essential to formal pragmatics, at the level of linguistic immanence, and which is essential to a discourse’s self understanding, at the level of conceptual cogency). Therefore, it can be misleading to conceptualize discourse relative to one kind of validation: “moral-practical” events of validation. Normativity in discourse logically transcends practical discourse, relative to standards of discourse as such (which is theoretical, ethical, and pragmatic altogether). It is the case that, “in this forum, only those norms proposed that express a common interest of all affected can win justified assent” (13), but this is a condition holding for discourse altogether, not especially “moral” discourse; it is more appropriate to speak of discursively derived *standards* that express a common interest of all affected, in light of which proposed norms within political, existential, theoretical, or pragmatic discourses can win justified assent. Understood in this way, a will that is determined by discursive grounds does not remain external to ethical deliberation, and thus not external to ethical responsibility and accountability of whatever scale of relevance, epistemic validity at whatever scale of relevance, or systemic realism of whatever scale of relevance. THEREFORE, “the will determined by moral grounds does not remain external to argumentative reason; the autonomous will is completely internal to reason” (13), because the potential for discourse is completely internal to our form of life. But Habermas’ evident attachment to the example of Kant straps him with a problem of “how norms, thus grounded, could ever be *applied*” (13) which doesn’t arise for the route through discourse that I am outlining here, since this route never has to break with ethical life, nor to justify a sense of “moral” categoricality that *arises* relative to egocentrically conceived existence (which was indeed Kant’s problem: what to do with all that desire and sensibility that clouded his faculties). But I say this, not having yet dwelled on how it is that an egocentrically conceived life may gain discursive altitude, so to speak, within itself in such a way that the democratic interest is grounded compellingly. In any case, one can’t turn to Kantian perspectives--and Habermas does not--for a solution to the problem of application when it *does* exist, as it must for any systematized context of interpretation (jurisprudence, theory-testing, evaluation of pragmatic means) when it is faced with *living* persons (distinct from formal persons, like parties in law or nations in treaties; in the case of formal persons, application is not a special problem, it is *the* problem, with which a system of law or diplomacy is *designed* to deal very *formally*). Habermas’ problem of application pertains to only the higher levels of legislation, policy formation and adjudication, which connect to the lifeworld in highly mediated ways that are pragmatic and, ultimately, ethical in a discursive sense. Though all discourse is susceptible to “a principle of universalization constraining participants in discourse to examine whether disputed norms could command the well-considered assent of all concerned,” only very specific and specialized situations of discourse are required (due to the scale of applicability) to *determine* that, in fact, disputed norms *can* validly command; and very few situations of discourse are required to be commanding “without regard to...existing institutions.” The situation of writers of constitutions and treaties comes to mind. “The validity claim we associate with normative propositions certainly has obligatory force” (14), but it is not the case that “duty, to borrow Kant’s terminology, is the affection of the will by the validity claim of moral commands” in any practical sense that is broken and distanced from ethical life. So, what to do with an egocentric mind? [To Be Continued] Best regards, Gary --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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