Subject: [HAB:] Freedom, Reflection and distance
Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2003 03:36:39 +0000


Gary

Thanks for your kind and detailed reflections on my post.

I cant possiblity do justice to your rich post. I would merely try to 
elaborate my
initial points bit further.

I take few of the points on your post in my subsequent mail.

1) When I differentiated between communication and reflection I had in mind 
something like the Foucauldian difference between freedom and ethics. 
Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics but ethics is the deliberate 
form assumed by freedom (Foucault). Also Foucault says:

“Freedom is practice; . . . the freedom of men is never assured by the laws 
and the institutions that are intended to guarantee them. That is why almost 
all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. 
Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because ‘freedom’ is what must be 
exercised . . .  I think it can never be inherent in the structure of things 
to (itself) guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is 
freedom”

Also

“I do not mean to say that liberation or such and such a form of liberation 
does not exist. When a colonial people tries to free itself of its 
coloniser, that is truly an act of liberation, in the strict sense of the 
word. But we also know that . . . this act of liberation is not sufficient 
to establish the practice of liberty that later on will be necessary for 
this people, this society and this individual to decide upon receivable and 
acceptable forms of their existence or political society”

Now comparing the above to Habermas it seems to me that Habermas theory of 
communicative action and his distinction between facts and validity in 
general delineates freedom as the ontological condition of ethics. The 
second corresponds to Habermas’ notion of autonomous ‘will formation’ but as 
Bernsetin notes “(e)ven the expression “intersubjective” fails to do justice 
to this paradigm shift  insofar as it suggests that the primary problem is 
to account for how autonomous subjects interact. Habermas’s claims are more 
radical. For it is only in the context of communicative action that we 
understand what constitutes subjectivity” (586). In this context Bernstein 
talks about what he calls “our dialogical being-in-the world” (ibid; italics 
in original) and attributes the notion to Habermas. Communicative action 
provides the condition of the formation of subjectivity while the actual 
formation of subjectivity within the context of communicative action is a 
deliberative act (Cf. Postmetaphysical Thinking: 24).

2) Reflection requires distance. This is implied in Habermas distinction 
between facticity and validity. The notion of validity as ‘transcendence’ is 
impossible without distance from the ‘reality’. Habermas characterises 
rationalisation of lifeworld in terms of distance that is achieved vis a vis 
the reality. Stephen While brings out this clearly when he defines Habermas’ 
conception of ‘decentration’ in the following:

[The] decentration means that . . . a conceptual separation between the 
cognitive-technical, the moral, and the aesthetic dimensions, as well as a 
reflective attitude toward these dimensions. The evolutionary importance of 
this change (in the sense of an advance in rationality) is that it allows 
for self-critique and an awareness of alternative interpretations of the 
world in all three dimensions (White, 1984: 31).

Not only conceptual differentiation between three elements White mentions 
requires distance from reality, the modernity (in turn) also consists in 
distance towards these very differentiations as White makes clear. Also 
reflection as distance is the condition of the possibility of “alternative 
interpretations of the world”. This is what Foucault terms as thinking 
differently.


Best
ali

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