Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 13:55:32 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: HAB: Thinking generally about Habermas' project


re: Matt, Re: Frankfurt, Starnberg, Munich [Y! Habermas.
I'm posting this also to the Spoons List, so I'm including
our earlier exchange, messy as it is. But I know that some
Spoons list subscribers are also Yahoo! list subscribers,
so apologies for cross posting. I don't want to make a
habit of this.]

------------------------------

> --- In habermas-AT-yahoogroups.com, Gary E Davis
<gedavis1-AT-y...> wrote:
> > Re2: Habermas vs. those French guys
> > 
> > Matt> Quick historical ask: after Starnberg, did JH
return
> > to the Frankfurt Institute in some sort of
> > honorary/emeritic capacity? 
> > 
> > G: My recolllection may be incorrect, but I believe
that he
> > was back at the Goethe University for some years before
he
> > became emeritus. 
> > 
> > G


M> still not sure of JH's career timeframe, but thanks for
your help.  His essay "On Systematically Distorted
Communication" in Inquiry  (1970)was written when JH was at
the J.W Goethe University in  Frankfurt so this is just
prior to the Max Planck Institute move. 

G: Thanks for jogging my memory here. He was back at
Frankfurt when he wrote _TCA_.

M> Interestingly Wiggerhaus writes that 
 "When he returned to Frankfurt ten years later to become
Professor of Philosophy, he regarded this project as having
failed." (1994: 658) 

> Meaning the development of "a programme of an
interdisciplinary social theory" (ibid).

G: What JH told me, 1980, was not that his project had
failed, but that he had failed to *communicate* his project
to mainstream social theorists adequately; he deeply
believed that he had been speaking to social theorists
generally, in the 1970s, but he was considered by the
mainstream to be a neo-Marxist addressing an especially
Marxist-Hegelian audience. He hoped for influence in
mainstream social theory outside of the Frankfurt School
tradition. You see in _TCA_ that Habermas is bridging
traditions---engaging both with FS sources and mainstream
human science (esp. AngloAmerican)---while also continuing
to advance his thinking on its own terms. 

There was clearly an evolution in his thought during the
1970s (_Legitimation Crisis_ is a major innovation), and
this evolution continues, large-scale, in _TCA_ (then
onward in the 1980s). _TCA_ is entirely concordant with
_CES_ and _LC_, but thinks beyond those statements,
relative to his discursive engagement with specific others
(Anglish anthropology, Weber, Adorno, Parsons, etc). _TCA_
is a set of readings---a reconstructive-critical
hermeneutic---that advance his philosophical-reconstructive
theory of communicative action *interactively*. 

M> I am having all sorts of difficulties "placing"
Habermas's  reconstructive project within Critical
Theory-within-western Marxism. 

I'm not surprised, but it's a good sort of
difficulty---potentially very useful for other theorists.
But JH is not basically working "within" that tradition,
rather working WITH it. *Relativizing* JH's project to that
tradition is an important and useful endeavor, but basing
his project in that tradition is a mistake. The
Gadamer-Habermas debate indicates JH's early engagement
with Critical Theory in tension with tradition---as an
intention whose intension is WITH tradition, standing "in"
its own discursive telos, so to speak, which became his
theory of communicative action (already identified as such
by Thomas McCarthy in the mid-70s, as he emphasized the
notion of communicative competence in JH's thought while
U.S. readers where still struggling  with JH's critique of
instrumental reason in _Toward a Rational Society_ and
critique of Hegelian Marxism in _KHI_.

M> In your opinion, does JH conflate the C.T of the
Frankfurt school with Western Marxism or historical
materialism?

G: I'm not clear what you're asking. In _CES_, he performs
a "reconstruction of historical materialism" that IS his
stand (in part---along with _LC_) toward Western Marxism;
the aim toward a theory of social evolution in the 1970s is
post-Marxist. And this reconstructive endeavor has left
historical materialism altogether in _TCA_, only to return
to Marx critically in the end, to assess what remnant
remains fruitful for contemporary social theory. After
_TCA_ reconstructive endeavor is a matter of developmental
psychology, discourse ethics, modernity, etc. 

M> he appears to move between the two as if they are one. 

G: He "appears...as if," but the movement itself isn't
articulable in terms of either. Already in the
"Introduction" to _TCA_, he is standing outside of the
Marxian tradition. The promise for historical materialism
that was still alive in LC and CES is gone in TCA and work
afterward. His discursive bridge between system and
lifeworld is complexly his own. Already in CES, the 3-fold
isomorphism of language and world, ego-to-ego and
group-to-group is unrecognizably Marxist or Hegelian or
even Kantian, and this flowers into a 3-fold isomorphism of
person, culture and society that is truly a specifically
Habermasian hybrid of influences. 

M> yet, the aporia of H. & A's critique of instrumental
reason surely only had a  substantive impact on the
tradition of F.S Critical Theory. Other proponents of
western Marxism didn't appear to be overwhelmed by the
dialectic of enlightenment thesis. 

G: So, what you mean is that only the critique of
instrumental reason had a substantive impact. I think
that's fair. In the U.S., the importation of specifically
FS work happened at the same time as much other
"Continental" work was coming into translation, and there
was already a tradition of social critique in the U.S. So,
FS work became available along with new phenomenological
work, such as Husserl's _Crisis_, Heidegger's work after
_B&T_ (which spawned a school of Heideggerian critique of
technology), Lukacs, and Merleau-Ponty, Gramsci, Enzo Paci,
and others (The Northwestern UP series on "Phenomenology
and Existential Philosophy" was well-established before
H&A's _DoE_ was available in English; the great journal
_Telos_ was a very hybrid creature, as much
phenomenologically-inspired as Marxist-Hegelian). There
wasn't a sense of the FS offering something unprecedented
for the 1960s and '70s, though the FS work was very useful
among other work, as complement in a broad discourse of New
Leftist theorization. 
 
M> Final ask: where does JH define his understanding of
reconstructive science? It is partly there in the revised
intro to  _Theory & Practice_; applied but not defined in
_CES_. Any pointers please?

G: It was defined in CES *as a practice* of reconstructive
(paraphrasing now) taking apart of a theory and rebuilding
it to better actualize its original intentions. The
entirety of TCA is a deepening and broadening of this
critical hermeneutical practice. But the keystone of his
*theorization* of this practice is _Moral Consciousness &
Communicative Action_ where philosophy itself (posed as
such) is reconceptualized as facilitator of new directions
in interdisciplinary reconstructive inquiry. Reconstructive
science as such is then theorized relative to
moral-cognitive development, which is then re-focused
beyond his work on this in CES. 







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