Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 23:51:44 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re:  Re: HAB: Money, power, and ... images?


Hello,

It's been a good while since I've posted to the list, but I've been lurking,
and it seems that things have gone full circle once again.

The fact is that Habermas's ideal speech situation--especially as suggested
in the second volume of TCA, where he addresses the rationally vs.
empirically motivated distinction--perpetuates/encourages a dangerously false
consciousness by denying the material/instinctual/power-based situatedness of
ALL communicative action.  

As I've said before, disembodied reason--communicative or otherwise--is
merely the flip-side of deworlded labor power.  

A related point: Don't all participants ALREADY KNOW that the consensus will
be materially enforced?  If so, the consensus is "empirically motivated" FROM
THE START--only, within the Habermasian framework, no one owns up to this
fact.

If the consensus has any bearing on participants' fulfillment, then it is
"empirically motivated", and therefore to be disparaged; if it is "rationally
motivated", it has no bearing on participants' fulfillment, and therefore to
be praised!  

I smell the mind-body split. . . .

Besides, I don't know how eg. Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud--or, for that matter,
Horkheimer, Adorno, or Marcuse--could take one's "Yes" seriously unless it
were, to a certain extent, "empirically motivated".

I've treated these themes at length in my recently published thesis,
"Critical Praxeology and Praxis: A Research Program", and in a paper entitled
"Culture, Tradition, and Instinct: Three Forms of Spontaneous Order and Their
Place within Civil Society", which I presented at the Institute of
Macroeconomic Analysis and Development in Slovenia.

BTW, are there any serious Schutz scholars on this list?

Erik Davis
Masters Candidate, Economics
California State Univ., Hayward
EDavisMail-AT-aol.com

Antti wrote:
------------------------
However,
it does not seem take into account their role on that level of
world-articulation
that we stand on, that which we could not deconstruct without falling into
nothingness. Or, put in another way, that use of images that would
persist in the ideal speech situation (like certain forces of power
would, too). 


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