Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 15:16:31 -0800 From: Eduardo Mendieta <mendietae-AT-usfca.edu> Subject: HAB: Language is not an institution and "false consciousness" Well, Gary and Bill: I did not mean to respond. I forwarded the e-mail from my home to my office computer for future consultation. But, let me write what I had in mind when I read these postings. The citation about language not being an institution comes from Habermas' essay "The Universality Claim of Hermeneutics" which is from 1970. The statement is paradigmatic of Habermas' approach. We ought not to forget that Habermas identified himself as a Heideggerian Hermeneuticist. His early work was deeply influenced by Heideggerian and Gadamerian Hermeneutics -as one can tell from reading _On the Logic of The Social Sciences_. One of his teachers, Rothacker, was a Heideggerian. etc. His recent work on the origins of the German philosophy of Language, where Habermas takes up the missed opportunities in the work of Herder, is also indicative of Habermas' resitance to assimilate language to an institution. Further, if we follow Christina Lafont and Charles Taylor, then the precursors and sources of inspiration for the Habermasian model of language, then we have to go back to the three Hs, i.e. Hamann, Herder, Humboldt, and we would have to add, Heidegger. Of course, Apel's mediation and translation (literaly and figurative) are also fundamental. The short version: for philosoophical reasons, Habermas must resist all attempts to assimilate language to the technochratic, instrumental and functional model and/or paradigm. What is at stake in this tradition is a notion of language as Welterschliessenden (World-Disclosing). Language is apophantic, or the cite of epiphany, of aletheia. Of course, language is also the way through which we deal with the world. Language is a tool that allows us to cope with the world. But I think the romantic, hermeneutic angle supersedes over or precedes the instrumentalist. (see the interesting comments in the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophical Discourses of Modernity, as well as McCarthy's comments). Now, if we go back to the time when Habermas is writing this essay on Gadamer, we will also note that Habermas is engaged in two fronts (sorry for the bellicose image). On the one hand, he is meeting head on the criticism coming from the philosophical left, and in Frankfurt in particular, from Apel and his students. This is the time when _Knowledge and Human Interest_ is causing much debate. He does a second edition in 70-71, in which he responds in particular to Apel and his student Böhler. On the other front, we have the conservative front, of which Gehlen is a particular version. At the center of both struggles is the issue of how to construe language. Interestingly, Apel has attempted to take the conservative discourse of Gehlen and reformulate it in terms of language as the meta-institution of all institutions. See the essay on volume one on Gehlen of Apel's Transformation of Philosophy. In any event, Gehlen, in his very popular book Man (Der Mensch -this book went through several editions and pritings) had attempted to articulate a philosophical-anthropological reading of language as an institution. But this reading was conservative. It refuted discourses of criticism and it failed to bring up questions of normativity, the good life, the just life...etc. Habermas wrote against Gehlen in his Philosophical-Political Profiles. I just checked on the publication date (also 1970). So, he is writing the essay on Gadamer as he is writing the essay on Gehlen. In short: I think Habermas refused to accept the simile or analogy because it is so tainted with conservative undertones. But, what about the Apel angle? He is neither a conservative, nor even at all an outside critic. Apel seemed to accept the notion. Not exactly. What Apel meant was that Gehlen's notion of the meta-institution was actually executed by language, but so long as we understand language in an exact transcendental-philosophical sense. As the institution of all institutions, as the grammar of all institution, as the deep syntax of all discourses and instititions of discourses. And, moreover, this very meta-institution, a transcendental apriori, that allows for self-reflexivity and self-creativity. Language is not just the meta-institution of all institutions, it is also the institution of all emancipatory discourse. This aspect is not separate but integral to language itself, which is what Apel and Böhler criticized against Habermas's _K&HI_ Would Habermas accept the image today? Thirty years later? I think not. I think that he would resist the attempt to attribute the properties and functions that ought to be performed by real institutions, and conversely, I think he is interested that we see institutions for what they are, namely hybrids of the normative and the instrumental (see for instance his treatment of the law in _FuG_ About "false consciousness": I think that Habermas has rejected this type of discourse because it gets us caught in a series of performative contradictions, and it prevents us from facing and raising questions of normativity and validity criteria. Who and under what conditions can any one denounce false consciousness? Here, we have to turn to the last chapter of _TCA_, volume 2. Second, as he moved from a Freudian to a Piagetian-Kohlbergian model of consciousness, and as he moved from Marx and Hegel, to Durkheim and Mead, the issue is not how a consciousness represents itself to itself and others, but how it is constituted or made possible through a web of relations that antecede it. Another way of saying it is that the discourse of false consciousness is part and parcel of the philosophy of consciousness --which as you know Habermas thinks we need to overcome. On the other hand, the critical aspects of such a talk are taken over by the notion of pathology and systematically distorted communication. Sorry, but I have to go pick up my kids. Keep up the good work. I read all the posting, even if I am not able to intervene. Eduardo Mendieta Assistant Professor Philosophy Department University of San Francisco 2130 Fulton Street San Francisco, CA 94117-1080 Tel: (415) 422-6313 Fax: (415) 422-2346 --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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