From: matthew piscioneri <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: HAB: The anti-climax of reaching an understanding
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 22:10:37 


Dear List,

First a note to Jeanne if your are still lurking around out there. Don't 
worry about asking *simple* questions. Reviewing the archives, I cringe at 
some of the dumb ones I have managed to concoct :-) At worst you'll be 
ignored & at best you'll be provided with a range of very useful 
interpretations.

Of late (and I mean the last couple of days); I have only come to appreciate 
how deep Habermas's hermeneutical & fallibilistic methodology is to his 
work. This makes Habermas much more transparent (method as truth ?). Oddly, 
it also makes me depressed. I think it's because I get annoyed with any form 
of linguistic idealism. As a BOL (boring old lefty), I intuit that language 
as a definer of world-limits and possibilities is somehow 
COUNTER-emancipatory. This goes for how i feel about Rorty as well. Again, 
there is something dead-ended & unsatisfying about turning the potential 
revelatory power of pragmatism (and Darwin is taken by me to be one of the 
main planks of pragmatism) into the cutesyness of language games. Derrida & 
Habermas were made for each Other ;-)

In agreement with Peter Singer in _A Darwinian Left_ (and yes the 
argumentation is fairly lightweight, but the main theme is solid) you can't 
leave Darwin out of emancipatory praxis (and here I treat theory and 
discourse as a form of praxis). It's not an original observation, but unless 
you keep Mead, Morris and Quine right at the forefront of your linguistic 
turn, then what we see in the brave new world of postmetaphysics, is the 
reproduction of categories from the bad old days, but dressed in the 
emperor's new clothes picked out from the  philosophy of language wardrobe.

This is fairly ad hoc what follows, but I think the reasons for this are at 
least twofold. Firstly, JH as an *immersed* descendant of the European 
philosophical tradition which concerns itself with all that stuff about 
redemption and salvation, universal reconciliations and returns to states of 
grace etc. This is why American Pragmatism (Peirce excluded....too 
European!) is/was so philosophically refreshing.

The second reason is what I will call the social darwinist hangover. I think 
this stands as a gatekeeper barring the (re) introduction of Darwin into CT. 
I suggest a re-introduction because what is also pressing is a revision of 
Marx's and Engels' naturalism (I realise it wasn't Darwinian in the sense of 
natural selection, and I am suggesting that it is still there in Capital).

And yes, I am having a BAD Habermas day.

Happy Habermas to all :-)

MattP



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