File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2001/habermas.0109, message 172


Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 16:38:50 -0700
From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of


At 12:02 PM 9/24/01 -0700, you wrote:

>Moreover, I take issue with your "genealogy" discussion almost
>immedidately. To wit:
>
> > To frame this psychoanalytically  which by no means contradicts
> > what  Habermas intends here  the third person perspective corresponds to
> > the  superego ("me"); the second person to the alter (the "other"); and
> > the  first person to the ego (the "I") [TCA II, 41].
>
>But such a frame *does* contradict what Habermas intends. You're
>substituting a focus on intrapsychical processes for a context
>dealing with actual intersubjectivity (not virtual intersubjectivity)
>and concerns about impartiality. "Framing" Habermas's opening context
>psychoanalytically is framing him in the worst sense.
>
>Regards,
>
>Gary

The superego is the "impartial perspective" as Habermas understands it. I 
have expressed in here in terms of a philosophical attitude as analogous to 
the superego because, in the end, there is no real difference. If the moral 
viewpoint is to have meaning at all, for subjects, it must be internalized. 
This means assigning it an agency within the psyche. I see no difference 
between the way in which Habermas sustains his intersubjective 'impartial' 
view and my reading of the superego here which is identical with this view 
as it relates to subjective experience qua intersubjectivity, as Habermas 
indicates in TCA, II. I'm not importing anything here, I'm extending 
Habermas's own work and description of his program. I should also 
emphasize, there is *always* an element of 'virtual' intersubjectivity 
entailed in communicative action. I know this because Habermas knows this: 
"Norm-testing reason still encounters the other as an opponent in an 
imaginary - because counterfactually extended and virtually enacted - 
process of argumentation. Once the other appears as a real individual with 
his own unsubstitutable will, new problems arise. This reality of the alien 
will belongs to the primary conditions of collective will formation" 
(15-16) (from the Employments essay). Norm-testing reason entails both at 
the same time; actual and virtual collective will formation. Without the 
virtual element, then the actual loses its 'idealizing' status. Again, the 
status of this 'impartial view' is split: between the determinate 
reflection and judgement of concrete actors in a communicative discourse, 
who test a maxim with regards to its validity under existing circumstances, 
and simultaneously an indefinite judgement, in the sense that the 
determinate judgement is subject to a rejoinder and its own presuppositions 
of counterfactual status. Since Habermas is dealing with an ideal type. He 
writes, "The discourse principle provides an answer to the predicament in 
which the members of any moral community find themselves when, in making 
the transition to a modern, pluralistic society, they find themselves face 
with the dilemma that though they still argue with reasons about moral 
judgments and beliefs, their substantive background consensus on the 
underlying moral norms has been shattered. They find themselves embroiled 
in global and domestic practical conflicts in need of regulation that they 
continue to regard as moral, and hence as rationally resolvable, conflicts; 
but their shared ethos has disintegrated. The following scenario does not 
depict an 'original position' but an ideal-typical development that could 
have taken place under real conditions" (39). My equation of the superego, 
which you've characterized as intrapsychic, is identical with the status of 
the 'moral point of view' in an ideal case, as it pertains to living 
subjects and not discursive fictions. Without accounting for the 
intrapsychic and intersubjective *in the same moment* we risk making 
nonsense out of the entire communicative schema.

ken



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