From: "matthew piscioneri" <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: HAB: Positive Dialectics
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 07:48:45 


Fred,

I deliberately left out Habermas's employment of either Piaget's or 
Kohlberg's developmental models, but as you rightly draw attention to it is 
*how* he presents -in a heuristic manner - what I have suggested to be a 
mode of social evolution based upon a positive dialectic.

(Fred)
>I wouldn't call it positive!
[snip]
>But, the obvious problem is the pervasiveness of self
>interest.

(Matt)
You don't seem to accept Habermas's thesis that the innate/natural *telos* 
of communicative language practice is to seek to reach an understanding, and 
that language practice which serves strategic social action (i.e. self 
interest) is parasitical on this original mode. And - to be frank - IMO why 
would you :-)

So, how to deal with self interest. I don't entirely know, except to offer 
these thoughts.

Are self-interest and communicative action entirely exclusive of each other? 
Don't know this one.

Is self-interest as pervasive as we are *led* to believe? By this I mean a 
lot of current sociobiology eg. Ridley & Cziko has attempted to dismantle 
just how pervasive the social consequences of the instinct of 
self-interest/self preservation is. Certainly, most people take it to be the 
dominant motivational paradigm in social behaviour, but this then is open to 
question from the standpoint of an critique of capitalist ideological 
practice.

I am conflating the paradigm/ethic/instinct of self interest here and would 
need you to clarify which *self interest* you are talking of.

I tend to see both the instincts and the paradigms of self interest v. 
social interest as operating in some sort of unavoidable tension, and I 
would argue that Habermas does too. In fact on a MACRO level the sorts of 
societies you and I live in seem to embody exactly these tensions...it's not 
a very original point but one to keep in mind I think with JH's work.

Given this tension, then JH's middle period work can be read on the level of 
*paradigm play* as working to protect/restore this balance especially 
following the rise to prominence of neo-conservatism in western democracies 
in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Not to mention the threat posed by 
PoMo.

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_.

It's not the same as PoMo pastiche, but it's not unrelated either. It's all 
about theory-as-something-else other than what the contents of the theory 
tells us. It's not philosophy-as-play, but rather something like playing 
with philosophy with a fairly serious intent :-) If that makes sense.

Like a lot of other critical social theory - and this is where Habermas 
stays continuous with Marx - he commits the *unnaturalistic fallacy*; he 
moves from the *ought* to the *is* in order to reaffirm the *ought* he is 
priorly committed to.

This probably returns us to your original statement re: the pervasiveness of 
self interest. I take its presence as both instinct and paradigm as forming 
part of the empirical conditions of possibility which confront the 
transacting of critical social theory.

Self interest is certainly part of the equation, but how big a part of the 
equation it forms on an empirical level is open to question; and perhaps 
more importantly how big a part of the equation critical social theory 
should grant it still remains a crucial part of the question.

It's analogous to the dilemma of sorts which I think feminist theory 
continually runs up against: construction v. biological essence. It's what 
makes the project of critical social theory so frustrating!

Cheers,

MattP.

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