File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2001/habermas.0110, message 102


From: "matthew piscioneri" <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: HAB: Positive Dialectics
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 09:34:35 


Fred,

thanks for your reply. At the outset I want to say I am suggesting what I 
consider is a useful and also fairly speculative reading of Habermas's 
metatheoretical agenda.


[MattP]
> >  In the end I guess it all depends on what you posit as the 
>metatheoretical
> >  basis for understanding Habermas's critical social theory production. I
>see
> >  it almost entirely in terms of his pragmatic methodology, which ismost
> >  clearly seen in the *paradigm play* he professes in the _TCA_.

[Fred]
>I do not call this play.  He is simply using the social sciences to 
>establish
>the basis for the possibility for communicative action, mutual perspective
>taking and the relevance of the idea that all speech acts are
>self-referential, i.e. we must understand another's or own speech act in
>terms of an ideal interpretation, otherwise we cannot make any
>interpretation.  He is also taking from the social sciences earlier
>perspectives on social integration to establish the reasoning involved in 
>the
>reaching understanding orientation.

Two of your phrases:

>He is simply using...
>He is also taking...

I guess my term *play* imparts a sense of triviality which is unintended; 
perhaps *manipulates* is more apt! My point is that Habermas openly 
acknowledges that he uses/takes (Giddens suggests *distorts*) social 
scientific paradigms to develop his own critical communication theoretic via 
the methodological technique of *reconstruction* - defined I think best in 
his essay on Marx in _CES_.

I don't feel we are at odds here; simply choosing to read Habermas's 
deliberate engagement with social scientific paradigms in different ways in 
order to further the processes of our understanding of his work.

I have pursued and even exagerrated the role Habermas's paradigm play has in 
his methodology for two main reasons. First, it emphasizes the essential 
hermenutical and extremely fluid method of his critical philosophy. Second, 
it helps me to - in a sense - *forgive* certain  flaws in his theory 
construction, which - if his work is examined TOO analytically - detract 
from its overall synthetic qualities.

On another level, it shows where Lyotard got it wrong in his oft-quoted 
charge re: Habermas's anachronistic penchant for *grand metanarrative*. My 
reading suggests that Habermas deliberately chose this genre of 
philosophical presentation rather than being written through by the text in 
any sort of Derridean way. For JH it's about sorting and shifting paradigms 
(stories/texts) in order to attempt to construct a newer and hopefully more 
*useful* paradigm (text/story). One which is then set out into the market 
place to fallibilistically sink or swim or even mutate into another form.

Yet one of the things Dews criticises Habermas for in his essay in the 
Anthology he edited in 1999 is Habermas's too definitive or finite approach 
to the theory of paradigm movement. Dews suggests that Kuhn's theory of 
paradigm change DID NOT suggest that paradigms were totally replaced or 
eclipsed as Habermas seems to suggest; rather traces (unfortunate term ;-)) 
always remained from the old in the new.

Still, if you don't find any thing of worth in reading Habermas in the way I 
am suggesting that's the way it is.

[Fred]
>I do not think of habermas as playing, even in the good sense of that 
>notion.
>His analyses seem to me to be well-researched and thought-out in terms of 
>his
>entire
>focus.  He seems to me to be someone who takes into consideration all of 
>the
>worst possibilities in human history when stating his notion of a 
>corrective
>course of action.

[Matt]

I wouldn't want to be thought of as suggesting the opposite

Cheers,

MattP

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