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 --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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