From: EDavisMail-AT-aol.com
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 02:09:11 EST
Subject: Re: HAB: Re: EDavis re: What are institutions?


[snip]
GARY DAVIS:
Habermas' concerns about subject-centered reason would be to the point (_Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_), since the tendency to read group consensus as subjectivity-writ-large is a hallmark of hegemonic thinking. 

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REPLY:
Gary, thank you for an excellent reply.  "Communicative vs. Subject-Centered Reason" is a great essay, though that's difficult to see unless one gets beyond (and is patient with) the first half.  

The fact that I started out suggesting that Habermas's equivocations can mislead one into "a dialogue that ends in a monologue" may have mislead you into thinking that the whole post was a critique of Habermas.  

I didn't mean it that way, only that, for example, to paraphrase one Habermasian phrase (I think this can be found in the Habermas of the late 60's or 70's), calling for "a wider participation and decentralization of the formation of THE COLLECTIVE WILL" [my emphasis]can be highly misleading if one wants to get beyond subject-centered reason.  I apologize for the lack of a reference (I think this particular example is from LEGITIMATION CRISIS), as I'm writing from an internet cafe in NYC far from my place and library in San Francisco.  Why THE collective will?  Too often in--at least the early--Habermas, we find THE collective will.  How about SEVERAL AND VARIOUS collective willS?  Collective wills that are varied, embodied and relevant, as you suggest.  (We'll leave the rest--the "macro" consensus, so to speak--necessarily to systemic processes [in the favorable sense that Habermas allows (i.e., "functionally integrated groups", TCA II]).  

You refer to a more practical and embodied sense of consesus, and as you can see I'm all for that, but the idea would instead be something like "a wider participation and decentralization of the formation of VARIOUS COLLECTIVE WILLS", wouldn't you agree?  If we go on insisting on forming THE collective will, that is all-too-easily tranlated into ONE intention.  Hence the apprehensions I voiced in my previous post.

(A similar point could be made, of course, regarding a "generalizable interest".)

Still, as you point out, the very problematic I am in and addressing is one clearly suggested by Habermas himself.  This is Habermas after Habermas.

Cordially,
Erik R. Davis
MA, Economics: Austrian School




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