Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 07:10:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Stephen Chilton <schilton-AT-d.umn.edu>
Subject: Re: HAB: Re: Morals & the good life, 10/24


On Sat, 25 Oct 1997, kenneth.mackendrick wrote, in reply to Gary
Davis, writing in reply to <etc.>:


> > 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.
> 
> I wonder if the distinction here rests on whether one 
> understands the heart of the moral human condition as one of 
> honesty or modernity.  If one understands modernity to the be 
> focus then Habermas may very well be right about this 
> (justice and solidarity).  However if one takes an orientation 
> from the idea of living an honest life - then one is not obligated 
> to be in solidarity with an abstract idea of "everyone."  Heller 
> argues for an ethics of personality and Habermas argues for a 
> discourse ethics.

>From one ignorant of Heller's argument:  my immediate, naive
reaction is that any discussion of the "honesty" of a life jumps
right back to Habermas's analysis in terms of validity claims,
particularly the claim of truthfulness. So I ask those more familiar
with Heller's work than I am:  does she (or Ken) provide a sense of
what "honesty" means beyond the meaning already covered by Habermas?

> > 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.
> 
> Yes, but Habermas still relies completely on his reading of 
> the intersubjective use of language.  Is it reduceable to 
> pragmatic presuppositions?  Yes, we address questions 
> directly to other people, but what is left over?  What "more" is 
> conveyed in these statements (aesthetically, 
> psychoanalytically, and hermeneutically).  And can this 
> "nonidentical" be thematized out without liquidating the 
> concrete nature of such expressions.  ie.  if you strip away 
> from a linguistic utterance its' particularity then will anything 
> be left?

This seems sort of mystical to me, in that it posits the existence
of "something left over" without giving any sort of example.  My
sense is that H. is very much aware of particularity and its
potential to undercut any generalized interpretation.  What is "left
over" from his system? 

In haste, as usual,

Steve

*************************************************************
| Stephen Chilton, Associate Professor, Dept of Pol Science |
|    Univ of Minnesota-Duluth / Duluth, MN 55812-2496 / USA |
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|                                                           |
| "Postmodernism is like the Toyota of thought:  produced   |
| everywhere and assembled in several different places and  |
| sold everywhere. . . .  a sign of the loss of the         |
| colonial model of a universal culture spread out to       |
| educate the world at large.  It is a theory for a post-   |
| colonial world of products sold in different places       |
| without a center. . . .  it is like the lingua franca of  |
| this world.  it can be made and consumed everywhere and   |
| nowhere.                                                  |
| 	- John Rajchman, passed along by Sharon Kemp        |
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