Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 01:39:00 -0800
From: Gary <gedavis-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: HAB: Re: Morals & the good life, 10/24


Brian Caterino’s posting today is very well done. 

He notes, first off, that “in the essay on Morality and Ethical life,
justice and *trust* are considered by Habermas to be complimentary
aspects of the moral life.”  This complementarity belongs to practical
reason itself, as Habermas outlines this in the 1988 “Employments”
essay. 

The former essay is “one point in which Habermas addresses some of the
concerns of an ethic of care.”  This connotes, validly I believe, a
mutuality of the moral life and an ethics of care that is reflected in
the complementarity. 

A basic question, then, is: How does that complementarity *exist*. How
*is* it--or, more idiomatically, how does it go? 

“To be sure Habermas rejects any *substantive* or ontologically anchored
conception of the good life[; yet], the notion of mutual trust and the
implications of mutual vulnerability are the bases for a broad
conception of human welfare.” By dwelling carefully with Habermas’
exploration in this essay, very much can be thought about how the
mutuality of complementarity (or is it: the complementarity of
mutuality) might be seen to exist, relative to Habermas’ endeavors, in a
way which is not basically Hegelian at all, as well as not basically
Kantian. But how it *does* indeed matter *practically* that “Habermas
rejects any *substantive* or ontologically anchored conception of the
good life” is a difficult and elusive matter. 

“Care and concern are anchored in the structure of intersubjecivity just
as much as ‘formal’ justice, which I don't think is formal in the
Kantian sense.” I agree: justice is not formal in a basically Kantian
sense for Habermas. The formality is comprehended in terms of the nature
of intersubjectivity, as expressed reflectively in the discourse ethic
and formal pragmatics, which clearly serves to ground his approach to
law, and this cannot be comprehended from either a Kantian or an
Hegelian perspective.

“What kind of conception of the good is possible if we accept (or do
we?) the rejection of metaphysically anchored conceptions of the
good[?]” Most readers would agree that “we” do, and *therefore* Brian’s
question has no brief answer that is comprehensible, let alone credible.
But that’s *our* PROBLEM, not Habermas’ especially. At a point, he
yields to others who are peers in inquiry. 

“Do we accept Habermas' contention from TCA through to the work on law
about the necessary separation in modern societies, of the right and the
good?” No, because Habermas doesn’t contend this. It is a reality that a
separation between the right and the good is clarifiable in discursive
rhetoric that is only available to modern frames of interpretation; but
it’s also a reality that ambiguity and ambivalence about what’s rightly
different from what’s good pervades modernity. Why else could the
question of the difference be interesting? It should be clear from
Habermas’ stands on complementarity in many texts by him that the
complementarity and mutuality does not express a “necessary separation”
in any way that can be understood apart from the complementarity of
ethical, pragmatic, and political reason. This is the case in the
“Employments” essay, and it is the case in every other text by Habermas
that’s relevant to the question of the difference. 

“He would reject the neo-Aristoelian claim that the separation of right
and good is a pathological separation that loses the substance of
morality.” I would like to know where Habermas reads neo-Aristotelian
ethics as claiming that the complementary “separation” is pathological.
This is not the case in his extended discussion of neo-Aristotelianism,
in _J&A_, “Lawrence Kohlberg and Neo-Aristotelianism”; and I don’t
recall such a view in “Remarks on Discourse Ethics.” Of course, no one
wants to buy into pathology (but, as well, no one wants to beg the
question by presuming that it is a necessary separation in *Habermas’*
understanding that is considered pathological).

Habermas “seems to say that the good doesn't disappear but it is
differentiated out from claims about justice and bears a different
relation to claims about justice than it did in previous societies.” 
The latter is quite true to Habermas, I think; but it seems to me that
the former part of your reading is not the case. Rather, justice is
differentiated out in modern times from classical ethics, which is based
in the good (and classical ethics reads any *meaning* to the concept of
justice as being a mode of the good; is this what Heller does?). What’s
distinctly *differential* about evolutionary differentiations is the
*systematic* dissemination of the difference--in the instance of
“justice,” it is systems of law, whose procedural ensurances of
*pluralism* in discursive constitutions of obligation cannot, arguably,
be comprehended in terms of a *singular* discourse of the good and
cannot be *institutionalized* as a mere discourse of pluralities in a
historical Present. 

The complementarity is basic for Habermas. On the one hand, as I’ve
argued in recent postings, impartiality can be found to be an inherent
potential of ethical life *as* ethical life (without *requiring* law in
most difficult conflicts that can be resolved in exemplary ways); on the
other hand, “moral” reason is still compelled by the democratic interest
in intergenerational institutionality. The difference between the good
and the right, ethical and moral life, is a real difference, though not
a necessary separation, in some extrapolation to all cases. 

Indeed, though, “We can't, he argues *integrate* societies around any
particular notion of the good life as in religious and metaphysical
views of the world.” This is a real problem for *us*: we are compelled
to seek integrative views of our own life, and of our personal, cultural
and social lifeworld--and even of life as such. 

But religious and metaphysical views make terrible politics, and cause
awful, interminable interpersonal conflicts, and are epistemically
untenable, without “illicit smuggling” in of modernist assumptions that
require dissociative attitudes toward thinking about basic religious and
metaphysical implications (I would argue, in Habermasian terms). 

What are we making ourselves to become? This is an Open questioning that
belongs to us all. 

There is a point--a “Place” of thought and communication--where it
*does* matter that one *should* not be fundamentally Hegelian--or
Kantian, but it is very difficult to realize how this is so (how, in a
manner of speaking, Is entails Ought). Habermas is rhetorically (in the
strong sense of the philosopher) Kantian at times, relative to some
kinds of views; and he’s Hegelian at times, relative to other kinds of
views. He’s Gadamerian, sometimes (e.g., in talk about “discourses of
application”); he’s Peirceian sometimes; etc. But at heart? He’s in a
“room” of historically implicative views--Aristotelian, Kantian,
Hegelian, Peircean, Meadian, Gadamerian, Piagetian....--and the room is
evolving, in the person of all the participants who are listening as
*participants*. 

As Michael notes (10/24), Habermas’ “Morality & ethical life:...”
(“MAEL”?) is “a partial defense of Kant against Hegel,” as was the first
part of _Knowledge & Human Interest_, just as both “MAEL” and _KHI_ were
Hegelian critiques of Kant. In response to my contention that Habermas
has carried the conception of critique beyond Hegel, Michael asserts a
belief that Hegel’s dialectical work is not only “as emancipatory as
Habermas,” not only “further to ‘the left’ than Habermas’ recent BFN,"
but even Habermas himself can be “even more Hegelian than Hegel.”

The issue here is the nature of underlying assumptions in argumentation,
which is very difficult to get at. Habermas’ basic advance beyond Hegel
stands in his competence to play all the roles in the room, in the
interest of advancing the scope of questioning, the depth of attention
to assumptions, etc., in a sense that was unavailable to Hegel’s dualism
of Subjective and Objective Mind. 

It’s very interesting to read the claim that “where Hegel addresses
concrete socio-
economic, constitutional and legal issues,...his dialectical work is -
in both its cognitive 
and political intent - as emancipatory as Habermas.” 

Habermas is as emancipatory as educational, clinical, and discursive
processes can be, inasmuch, as researchers in overtly Habermasian veins
(which I will cite, as time goes on) focus so much on particular senses
of educational (moral-cognitive developmental), clinical
(psychoanalytic), and discursive (post-metaphysical) interventions into
systematically distorted contexts that have been thematized to such a
great extent in keeping with advancements of the social sciences that
are incomprehensible *validly* in Hegelian terms. I confess that a
Hegelian reading of the contemporary human sciences seems to me
implausible (after years of identification with Marxist readings of the
world, in every post-Stalinist vein).

This is not to say that Hegel didn’t profoundly comprehend nineteenth
century society. But why would you *want* a “dialectical unity of
positive and negative rights” in a *democracy*, where insight for
resolving intractable problems requires as much pluralism of new views
as feasible, which in turn requires a priority of “negative liberal
rights” for the sake of that creative public interpretation of “positive
welfare rights” that would be legislated creatively, administered
fairly, and adjudicated appropriately? 

In any case, I look forward to recalling your challenge “to read the
postscript to BFN on the relationship between positive and negative
rights as anything other than a restatement of a form of dialectics that
is noticeably hegelian, even more hegelian than hegel,” after I’ve
completed a review of the works by Habermas that he considers
fundamental to his own self understanding. 

I can’t disagree with you, though, that the practice of law gets pretty
distortive. But critique of ideology always implies a post-critical,
methodologcal stance by which to validate one’s claims of “a covering
over of the possibility of the demonstration of...social and ideological
grounds” for particular cases. And a critique of ideology also implies a
post-critical vision of things that doesn’t leave critique in the
situations of Negative validity that so often has undermined progressive
political aspirations. 

Ken notes, quite constructively in his response to Brian, that “a vision
of the good life may be open to procedural debate.... esp. if justice is
understood as a vision of the good life.” I enthusiastically agree with
the first part of this statement; but the situations in which a vision
of the good life might *actually* be taken up in procedural debate would
have to be those situations in which procedural debate is normally
carried out, obviously. And those situations could only be highly
systematized settings which are designed to assure a pluralism of
conceptions of the good life that belongs to all who are considering
what is good for *us*. The more systematized the deliberations become,
the more stringent becomes the domain of goods that are in the general
interest: highly abstract, largely exchangeable, and widely pragmatic
goods that are abstract, exchangeable and pragmatic *features* of good
lives, but with less and less particular life-historical role in the
self identity of *a* good life or good lives, in direct proportion to
the degree of abstractness, exchangeability and pragmaticness of the
good that is systemically *relevant*.  

Basically, one would not *desire* that debate about the good life be
very proceduralized. One doesn’t gain any insight into the *character*
of a good life by transposing the focus of attention to what’s
procedurally relevant. However, inasmuch as evaluative standards *are*
indeed relevant to intersubjective validations of what’s good for “us”,
this always takes place relative to possibilities for debate to
*exemplify* general interests that imply the value of impartiality in
deliberation. 

But it is a mistake to understand justice “as a vision of the good
life.” This would be to understand justice in terms of solidarity,
rather than conceiving understanding as a complementarity of justice and
solidarity, appreciation of difference and appreciation of identity.
Reduction of the value of difference to a concept of identity is not
attractive in creative environments, not to mention a mode of politics
that doesn't tend toward bureaucratic socialism.

A complementarity of appreciations *requires* that, as you say of
Heller, “justice is a chosen value of the good life,” at *least*.  But
if justice is *at most* chosen (rather than inherent to
intersubjectivity as such), then the charge of decisionism becomes
credible. 

“We might want to consider that Habermas’ theory is pathological in
[the] regard” that Brian indicates about alleged neo-Aristotelian
attitudes toward necessary separation. We might want to consider that
you’re being silly. 

“Habermas’ model is based upon the Kohlbergian model.” Habermas’ model
of what--the relationship between the good and the just? No, this
relationship is based upon the theory of communicative action
altogether, and this includes Piagetian and Kantian motifs that Kohlberg
adoped in his own researches, which are highly engaging instances of
“reconstructive science.”  But not basic, in any sense that’s relevant
to Habermas’ sense of the context that became the
communitarian-universalist debate.

“Is Gilligan's critique successful in that it successfully produces an
'enlarged mentality' which necessarily incorporates justice and care
(Benhabib, Situating the Self).”  Now that’s a very interesting
question. I think: Yes. 

“[If] we follow Gadamer (Truth and Method) or Benhabib then
understanding encompasses a meaningful aspect of the good life touched
with a sense of justice.” Sure.

“Habermas's response has been that these things can be separated out.” 
So, what? There’s no incompatibility between having an enlarged
mentality and an appreciation of differences. 

“Does Habermas have any evidence to support this?”  How about reading
the article that Michael recommended that Brian is discussing?  Or, you
might recall that I’ve been addressing this in postings that you find
“very, very long.”  By the way, fishwrap is the fate of newspapers;
journalists (‘round San Francisco, anyway) have been known to cynically
reconcile themselves to the fate of their exhausting efforts of
investigation and writing and editing by fondly referring to their work
as “fishwrap”. 

Back at the ranch.... “Does Habermas have any evidence to support this
[separation]? or is he right in supporting Kohlberg's thesis that "men"
tend to orient themselves toward a moral domain whereas "women"
generally orient themselves around an ethical domain [?]”  I’m happy to
see you pick up on the gender theme that I recommended to Debbie Kilgore
a while back (HAB: On the difference between moral and ethical reason,
10/7), which has been close to my heart for many, many years. So, you
want to consider the “separation” of the good from the just in terms of
one’s sense of the relationship between women and men?

Ha! Are you my straight man, or *what*?

Gary


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