Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 16:50:46 -0800 (PST)
From: Gary D <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: HAB: Habermas & Hegel's Jena period - part I


Re: Ken, 14 Jan, "HAB: No, Re: Lacan and Habermas: understanding as
control?"

K: So, back to Hegel...

G: And a second-more specific-response for my part. 

I enjoyed you recounting of Habermas' discussion of Hegel's Jena
period, inasmuch as it's straight exposition interested in
understanding Hegel--which is a good thing to do through Habermas'
reading; he's an outstanding reader of Hegel, of course. But your
"illustration" that "Habermas's reading of Freud is indebted to his
reading of Hegel" is untenable in terms of your notes; more
plausibly, the converse is the case: You're showing Freudian themes
in Habermas' reading of Hegel (while JH is doing a LINGUISTIC
PRAGMATIC reading of Hegel that presumes Freud).

Earlier, I had complained that turning to Hegel for understanding of
Habermas is invalid, and I showed that your actual discussion earlier
(Saturday)--your Hegelian turn (which I turned into a
polemical-playful dialogue in response)--*does* relate to the
developmental contexts that are relevant to JH's own interest in
moral-cognitive development. In other words, while Hegel isn't
relevant for understanding Habermas' thinking, your Hegelian interest
can be transposed into aspects of individuation.

------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Your re-presentation of JH's analysis of Hegel's Jena-period-thought
goes for 5 paragraphs before you make any argumentative claims (which
I'll get to in a second). By "argumentative claim," I mean: a
statement which contributes to your own stance that you're backing,
i.e., your "illustration".

In your 6th paragraph (It would have been nice if you made
referencing easier by numbering all your paragraphs, not just your
comments), you say:

K: For Habermas, then, "Spirit is the communication of individuals in
the medium of the universal, which is related to the speaking
individuals as the grammar of a language is, and to the acting
individuals as is a system of recognized norms" (Habermas 1973: 146.
We should note that Habermas's analogy here bears a sharp resemblance
to Kant - immediately "spirit" is reduced to - understood through -
regulative rules (grammar --> recognized norms)….

G: There's no resemblance to Kant; the point is that pragmatics is
anticipated by Hegel. Literally, Spirit = communication in the
medium; and Spirit : speaking individuals :: grammer of a language :
speaking individuals (Spirit is *like* a grammer); AND Spirit :
acting individuals :: system of recognized norms : acting individuals
(Spirit is *like* a normative system). Spirit is like a grammatically
normative system. The communication of individuals (the Habermasian
interest not born from Hegel) in the medium of the universal (the
Hegelian conterxt) is like a grammatically normative system (a
linguistic pragmatic notion that anticipates formal pragmatic
analysis). You can see, then, that what JH is doing here is part of
re-thinking Hegel pragmatically, not associating to Kant at all.
Also, by the way, we can see from "What is Universal Pragmatics?" (as
I indicated yesterday to Matthew) that JH was not (in the _Theory &
Practice_  period) going toward a Kantian sense of pragmatic a
priori.  Habermas in the 1960s, was part of those re-discovering the
Hegel that Marx missed and misread, which became basically a return
to Hegel for some (not JH)-and a *retropective* renewal of Hegel for
others (such as JH). Here, JH is finding the inception of pragmatics
in Hegel's early thinking. 

In your next paragraph, you free associate (evidently) from the
Hegelian notion of love to the "point…that 'love' -
psychoanalytically understood - is a transference relation." 

Not only is this false (transference "love" is a narcissitic
pseudo-love), but your free association is not justifed by text: JH
is not making inferences to psychoanalytic notions (and Hegel is
talking about "the living feeling the living"). You're projecting
your interest into the reading, and JH is your "object". [I'm
skipping all your paragraphs that seem fine to me, which is most of
your discussion!]

Your next paragraph begins: 

K: What is dialectical, for Habermas, ….

G: This sleight of hand in a discussion by JH about what is
dialectical for *Hegel* helps create the theme you'll later presume. 


K:…is not unconstrained intersubjectivity itself, but the history of
its suppression and reconstitution. 

G: I would say: What is dialectical for Hegel is, for Habermas, a
suppression and reconstitution of intersubjectivity. 

K: The distortion of the dialogic relationship is "subject to the
causality of split-off symbols and reified logical relations...
relations that have been taken out of the context of communication
and thus are valid and operative only behind the backs of the
subjects." 

G: See, this kind of talk is only possible by reading Hegel *after*
Freud.

K: The struggle for recognition, then, meets up with the "causality
of fate" through ideological distortions of intersubjective
relations. 

G: This is a distinctly Habermasian amplification of Hegel, not a
construal of what Hegel understands. A process of re-thinking and
modernization is going on, not mere archeology of a mentor. Habermas
is restoring Hegel for contemporary modeling. 

K: Again, this foreshadows Habermas's reading of Freud - if not
determining it.

G: "Again"? As if you've been making this argument? But this is your
first mention of this theme, which is invalid. "This" *shows* a
post-Freudian Hegel, not some foreshadowing. 

K: Habermas illustrates this point with reference to Hegel's
discussion of a "criminal"…

G: Habermas' discussion of Hegel's discussion of the criminal
illustrates *your* interest in a Hegelianized Freud, nothing more. 

K: …I'm tempted to speculate about the assigned role of guilt here.
It seems to me to be too narrowly conceived... what if we 'get off'
on feeling guilty? 

G: So, you're tempted to dispute Hegel's analysis. Fine. 

K: What if 'normative rules' function to sustain enjoyment through
their very transgression. 

G: This would be a dysfunctional relationship to rules. 

K: In other words: can we not consider grammatical rules those rules
which we establish *only* so that breaking them yields richness in
poetry...

G: Like a reference point for improvisation? You're really feeling
the constraints of the Hegelian analysis, aren't you? (Beats me why
you're so interested in Hegelian thinking.) No, grammatical rules
aren't overtly established; they're inherited and, in a way, they're
living organons that evolve (as Shakespearean idiom dramatizes: Where
does its historical distance from us stop and its appeal as poetry
begin?). One might consider fabricated systems as infrastructures for
flexible action (like a skeleton for the dancer). So, you're off into
your own speculations, which is interesting (but unrelated to your
reading). 

Three paragraphs later:

K: Habermas 1973: 154). Habermas notes, the splitting up of the "I"
existing in its drives is the splitting of the "I" into the reality
testing ego and into the repressed instinctual demands. By way of the
subjection of oneself to causality of nature, consciousness,
returning back to itself from reification, returns as the cunning [or
artful] consciousness. Again, we can see shadows of Freud here. 

G: Of course: It's the influence of Freud on Habermas' reading of
Hegel, not intimations of an Hegelian influence on the reading of
Freud. 

Now, I totally agree with your summary statement:

K: To summarize, Habermas finds in Hegel's Jena lectures a link
between labour and interaction, as self-formative processes. Although
this dialectic is dissolved in Hegel's later work, it provides the
groundwork for a rigorous distinction between instrumental and
communicative action: wherein which instrumental action is
parasitical on communicative action.

G: But, in order to have your Lacanian moment (I guess), you get
bizarre, in your discussion of "Habermas' Return to Hegel, 1999",
when you write (first quoting JH):

K: (H) "… Participants who find themselves related to one other in an
intersubjectively shared life-world must at the same time presuppose
- and assume that everybody else presupposes - an independent world
of objects that is the same for all of them" (Habermas 1999: 142). I
can't help but think this presupposition has the status of a fantasy.


G: Only by sustaining the difference between actuality and fantasy
(usually tacitly, as a matter of habit) can we do anything with each
other, which requires common ground. This assumptiveness (which is
basic to the notion of embodied lifeworld, from Alfred Schutz onward
in phenomenology and for Ordinary Language Philosophy, in the
Wittgensteinian and Austinian vein) is always nebulous (which is why
presumed validities can be hypothesized as mere claims, when we
misunderstand each other, which is common enough!).

K: Habermas calls it a pragmatic presupposition - that may be true -
and that's fine, but we need to mull over what it means to operate
according to presuppositions. 

G: Fine! What's philosophy for?

K: If this is something that cannot be pragmatically escaped, then it
seems to me that the idea of presuppositions itself is mistaken. 

G: Who says presumptions can't be questioned?

K: We don't "presuppose" gravity - we just fall. 

G: Tell this to astronauts back from weeks in "Space", as their
bodies are shocked by the "presupposition" (HABITUATION, habit) of
weightlessness.

K: So presuppositions must operate on another level - and I've
suggested this is best examined in terms of fantasy, …

G: In your dreams.

K: …but, of course, this has different implications than the ones
that Habermas discusses.

G: Indeed. So, now to your comments on your own notes. Generally,
you're sketching ideas that interest you--interesting!--but you're
also doing things with JH's texts that are not valid.

K: 1. Habermas-Hegel present us with an interesting paradox. 

G: This is a set-up, presuming a nearness with the hyphen that is
invalid. 

K: The self can only achieve self-consciousness by being mirrored by
another. 

G: According to Hegel. For Habermas, it's not this simple. 

K: What this suggests, however, is not only that language is the
medium of our recognitions, but also that mimesis and mimetic
behaviour plays a key role in communication….

G: Yes, symbolic interaction (as in reflection and deliberate
articulation or presentation) involves representative terms and
rhetorical figures which render; this is the most ordinary aspect of
the pragmatic dimension of communication (as distinguished from the
semantic). 

K: 2. I think we need the Lord and Bondsman dialectic rather than the
Jena dialectic that Habermas discusses…

G: It's not a matter of "rather"; rather it's a matter of finding the
normative basis for critique. Lord and Bondsman is Hegel's version of
critique of ideology; and the Jena period provides insight into
Hegel's background normative analysis (which he shouldn't have
shelved). We needed critique of domination, especially during the
Cold War; but perhaps more than this, we needed to know what comes
after critique: What's a rational society that is good (maybe
evolutionary?)? Of course, Habermas helped re-find Hegel in the 1960s
for a new German thinking (for a split Germany after Nazism, after
the communist model of democracy had become Stalinism and Marxism was
bureaucratized elsewhere). And his historically rooted pragmatism,
carried into the readings of KHI and beyond, evolved a basis for
Critical Theory from there.  

[To be continued, maybe]

Gary




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