File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2000/habermas.0011, message 69


Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 16:08:10 -0800 (PST)
From: Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: HAB: Language and Institution



--- Eduardo Mendieta <mendietae-AT-usfca.edu> wrote ("Re: Language is
not an institution...."):

>... We ought not to forget that Habermas identified himself as a
Heideggerian Hermeneuticist....

This is a very interesting thing to "remember", since JH is widely
regarded as antipathic toward Heidegger (e.g., _Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity_[PDM]). I've always wanted to believe that JH
was basically influenced by Heidegger (not just secondarily
influenced during a Schillerian youth), but I've "believed" this not
on the basis of anything Habermas, to my knowledge, *said* (or
wrote). 

> ....What is at stake in this tradition is a notion of language as
Welterschliessenden (World-Disclosing). Language is apophantic, or
the cite [sic! Derrida lives] of epiphany, of aletheia....

I'm in accord with this, re: language--but one sees Habermas
distancing himself from this in _PDM_. Open to the "poetic" in
principle, Habermas seems practically (in all cases) to keep distant
from a poeisis that can lead to political aesthetics, which leads to
the German Problem--or at least, this is what I've guessed.  

The challenge, then, is to clarify how language is constitutive (or
world-disclosive) without political overtones. This requires a clear
differentiation between the communicative and world-disclosive
potential of language (which, by the way, a language-as-institution
thesis dangerously occludes--conversely from poietic occlusion--by
absorbing world-disclosure into the accountability/responsibility
domain of communicative life, which ontologizes reason, beyond
pragmatic interests). JH has always granted that there's more to life
than what's relevant to communicative action, but only what's
relevant to communicative action can figure into a good *social*
life, which is JH's discursive "star".  

> ....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. 

And Searle appears to echo this meta-ism in _The Construction of
Social Reality_ chapter on language, also missing (in his response)
the point of JH's critical remark against Searle's hyper-institution.

> In short: I think Habermas refused to accept the simile or analogy
> because it is so tainted with conservative undertones.

Yeah: Assilimating world distinctions to hegemony of the Given
(concealing as well a late-Heideggerian realization of the Giving).
 
> 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....

Searle's transcendentality is his theory of mind, which he
understands to be ontologically prior to language, not by the way...

> As the institution of all institutions,as the grammar of all
institution, as the deep syntax of all discourses and instititions of
discourses. 

But, Searle might claim, any *understanding* of mind AS mind--let
alone philosophy of mind--is immediately confronted with its
linguistic relativity, hence the centrality of language *as*
institution (which is the extent of his claim about language in
_Construction of Social Reality_, I believe).

> And, moreover, this very meta-institution [now turning Edurardo's
comments about Apel to commentary about Searle as well], a
transcendental apriori, that allows for self-reflexivity and
self-creativity. 

However, though...

> Language is...the meta-institution of all institutions, [and] also
the institution of all emancipatory discourse.

...it doesn't follow that language itself is essentially an
institution (not that Eduardo is commenting against his own email
Subject line). Without being reducible to instiutionality, language
still expresses the metainstitutionality of linguistic relativity in
communicative life.

> This  aspect is not separate but integral to language itself, which
is what Apel and Bhler criticized against Habermas's _K&HI_

Inappropriately, in my view, since a fullness of institutionality is
not concealed by the practical interest in KHI; yet, the practical
interest of *knowledge* (which is potentially evolutionary) cannot be
grasped institutionally--evolution requires the possibility of
trans-metainstitutionality, in the sense of the possibility of
(re)paradigm freedom (or whatever).

> 
> Would Habermas accept the image [of metainstitution] today? Thirty
years later? I think not. 

I agree. But he might accept the kind of complementarity that I'm
sketching above.

> I think that he would resist the attempt to attribute the
properties
and functions that ought to be performed by real institutions [to
language], and conversely, I think he is interested that we see
institutions for what they are, namely hybrids of the normative and
the instrumental...

Again, I agree. (And I've snipped all of Eduardo's comments on false
consciousness because I can think of nothing to add. I just totally
agree.)

> Sorry, but I have to go pick up my kids.

A clear instance of giving the institution of family (whose deeply
embodied affectivity can't be reduced to linguisticality) priority
over the institution of discursive interplay. I suppose your "sorry"
is a postconventional exit. :->

Having no kids of "pick up", I exit, Stage 7 (I wish).

Gary





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