Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 12:46:39 -0400
Subject: Re: HAB: The concept of reach understanding


 My question
>is: How can the process of "reach understanding contribute to human
>emancipation, and from what kind of emancipation are we talking since
>Habermas thougth.
>
>Very thanks.


For one, there is the very simple truth that as we reach understanding,
then no one acts from authority anymore. Everything we do is done so
through because we have acheived understanding and have agreed to the
action.  Thus, using Habermas' example in TCA: the new guy on the
construction team is told to go get some beer for the lunch break.  He does
not understand why he has been chosen, or why they shgould have beer, etc.
Through communication, the new guy acheives an understanding of the
situation with the other construction workers.  This does not necessarily
mean that he changes his mind about what is appropriate.  But somewhere
along the line in an ideal speech situation free of domination. the whole
group comes to have the same understanidng about what happens next.

        Second, however, we should pay close attention to what Habermas
says in the final pages of TCA and also in the essay "The Unity of Reason
Through the Diversity of its Voices" in Postmetaphysical Thinking.  First,
in TCA, we have a discussion of how labor, when rendered abstract and
indifferent, is a special case of "the transference of communicatively
structured domains of action over to media-steered interactions" (402-3).
Labor, and other aspects of our lives, are aspects of our life-world- a
part ofourlife where we find meaning.  When these aspects of the life-wprld
are given over to steering-medioa, money and bureacracy, then we lose
control of our world and experience a sense of a loss of meaning.
Habermas' contention is that we must restore such aspects of our life to a
communicatively oriented life, where in we structure our lives and world
through reaching understanding.  Communicative action/rationality oriented
toward reaching understanidng allows us to take control of our lives and
establish a sort of unity between the aesthetic, moral, and instrumental
aspects among which we have been divided in a modernity run rampant.
        The end of the "Unity of Reason" is more helpful here.  FOr
example, he states that communicative reason inspires the project f
acheiving an "emergence out of a cooperative endeavor to moderate, abolish,
or prevent the suffering of vulneravle creatures" (146).  Further, because
of the preformative nature of communicative action, every speaker has "the
possiubility of employing the "I" of the illocutionary actin such a way
that it becomes linked to the comprehensibleclaim that I should be
recognizedas an individual person who canot be replaced in taking
responbsibility for my own life history" (144).  Finally, Habermas claims
that in a modernity where instrumental reason dominates, life seems very
contingent.  We no lonmger have referents for coping with such contingency.
This creates a discouragement in us.  "But this discouragement will shed
its character of being unavoidable if it is possible to defend and make
fruitful for social thgeorya concept of reason that attends to the
phenomenon of the lifeworld and permits the outmoded concept of the
"consciousness of society as a whole"  to be reformulated on the basis of a
theory of intersubjectivity" (141).  In  short, then, by using language
oriented toward reaching understanding we find our individuality, we engage
in a project of ending the suffering of vulnerable creatures and we end the
discouragement so characterisitc of our modern era.

Jeffery

Jeffery L. Nicholas
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY. 40506
jlnich1-AT-pop.uky.edu




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