Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 20:14:47 -0800
Subject: Re: HAB: post-Hegelian context and prescriptive


Christopher Gontar's note is appended here,

*  *  *

My first thought--responding to C.G.'s note--is that Heidegger's _Being
and Time_, more
than any text by Habermas, is appropriate here. Existentialism is
basically (historically
speaking) a Christian (post-Christian, anti-Christian) problem of
*theocentrism* vis-a-vis
modern rationalism (oversimplifying here for the sake of acknowledging a
proper
historicity), which Heidegger counterposes to the Hegelian condition of
"ontotheological
thinking" in _Identity and Difference__.

Yet existential issues are highly relevant to Habermas' thinking. But,
getting at this, in
accord with Habermas' work, would be a somewhat indirect endeavor
(though I could
suggest my own earlier postings on Habermas' "Employments" essay, to be
self-serving).

Anyway, it may be as plausible to argue that insecurity
(predictive/prescriptive invalidity)
*causes* existential dread as to contend that "existentialist dread
seems to preclude us from
any valid prescriptive or predictive thinking...."

A weakness of spirit --analytic philosophy's weakness of will (or
akrasia)-- is a very
"diagnosable characteristic," as Heidegger shows in his analysis of
nullity, etc., and as all
psychotherapists know.

Moral constructivism is not basically motivated by a defense against
facing oneself or
against facing one's lack of freedom. Habermas' sense of moral-cognitive
development
attests to the *validly* constructive character of our concern for
mutuality, reliability, and
self-representation in "moral" terms.

> Is the left-wing/right-wing dialectic after Hegel a reflection of the
opposition between
prescriptive and descriptive thought?

To a Hegelian, probably. But that's the thing about Hegelians: their
self-positing
problematics, especially the reduction of differences to dualistic
oppositions.

>Or is one [prescriptiveness, say] an idealization or pejoration of the
other [description]?

No, for intersubjectivity is not constituted relative to states of
affairs, as states of affairs are
not constituted relative to conditions of intersubjectivity. Rather each
are constituted in a
threefold lifeworldliness, so to speak, where basic kinds of
differentiations emerge
ontogenically, such that one kind of meaning may be the *content* of
another's
propositions, in particular acts of understanding, each being already
always a threefold of
perceptive (self-expressive), intersubjective (communicable), and
referential (ascertainable)
meaning.

I know I'm being obscure. Not deliberately, though. This is just the way
things are....

* *  *

It seems to me that the legacy of the Hegelian Dialectic has little
validity anymore outside of
an emancipatory interest which is therapeutic--notwithstanding academic
discourses that
have inherited Hegelian rhetoric for their own self understanding,
involving the
conundrums of overcoming a mode of understanding that posits the
oppositions that it
supposedly discovers---something psychoanalysis has attended to with
special immanence.

In any case, an escape from freedom can no longer be pursued
constructively outside the
modes of interpretation that psychoanalytics and developmental studies
focus on (i.e.,
existential condition of *being* the result of a "village"'s failure to
have given what it takes
to raise its children).

But I say all this, not to invite ANOTHER interchange between Hegelians
(as if the Marxist
spaces aren't enough for this); rather, I just want to emphasize that
existential inquiry
belongs as much to a Habermasian sensibility as to an overtly, say,
Heideggerian
sensibility.

[And maybe I'm tacitly lamenting my failure to finish last November's
discussion of
Habermas' "Employments" essay, in that I never returned to the context
of existential self
clarification that Habermas conveys there.  Besides, I don't think
anyone on this list really
cared to see my examination continue anyway, which was--is--okay by me.
There are too
few hours in the day as it is.

-------------------------------------------------------------
christopher gontar wrote:

     Gentlemen,

          Sometime ago I began seeking the historical conditions of
     existentialism, i.e., as causes, and I have arrived the
conventional
     reply, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French
revolution.
     The revolution had actually been my first guess, perhaps due to my
     ignorance of the reformation's effect, as for Lukacs, for example.
         But for me the fundamental problem with this question is that
     existentialist dread seems to preclude us from any valid
prescriptive
     or predictive thinking, since for Sartre and Kierkegaard it is the
     weakness of spirit, though again not a diagnosable characteristic,
     that spirit tries to escape freedom by constructing prescriptive
moral
     systems.
         Is the left-wing/right-wing dialectic after Hegel a reflection
of
     the opposition between prescriptive and descriptive thought? Or is
one
     an idealization or pejoration of the other?

                                                   Lcpl Gontar, C.D.










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