Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 17:04:47 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HAB:] The Difficulty with Habermas


re: George, "Re: Germans vs. those Americans

--- gdemetrion-AT-msn.com wrote:

> I still get blown away by the density of Legitimation
Crisis, though his latter work seems to be more accessible.
 

Gary: "Blown away" is the perfect rubric, since it was a
common one in the mid-70s when the book was written,
translated in '75, I believe. I found parts of it
impenetrable, which reminds me of a JH comments that MattP
has quoted more than once: that JH's "research program" has
a continuity that begins around 1970 and has "not changed."
The density of _LC_, read retrospectively, is exactly a
compression of "argumentation sketch" (JH called it at the
time) that comprehensively anticipates _Theory of
Communicative Action_ 8 years later. You (One) can see from
that book why a reader (myself) would put so much emphasis
on a theory of social evolution as being the axis of JH's
project. This came back to mind today when I was looking at
some late-in-the-book passages of TCA that are a remarkable
synopsis of JH's overall intentions, in terms of an
interest in fostering social evolution (TCA2:
313middle-314middle). Looking at that, I sense that all he
has written is in service to fostering evolutionary
"potentials". 

> ...I am wondering if you can give us a little 3-4
paragraph description [of _Truth and Justification_ at this
time.

I haven't received the book yet, though it's now in stock
at MIT Press, and I have an order in. The book announcement
is this:

Jürgen Habermas has developed the theory of communicative
action primarily in the context of critical social and
political theory and discourse ethics. The essays collected
in this volume, however, focus on the theory's implications
for epistemology and metaphysics. They address two
fundamental issues that have not figured prominently in his
work since the early 1970s. One is the question of
naturalism: How can the ineluctable normativity of the
perspective of agents interacting in a linguistically
structured lifeworld be reconciled with the contingency of
the emergence and evolution of forms of life? The other is
a key problem facing epistemological realism after the
linguistic turn: How can the assumption that there is an
independently existing world be reconciled with the
linguistic insight that we cannot have unmediated access to
"brute" reality?
 
_Truth and Justification_ collects Habermas's major essays
on these topics published since the mid-1990s. They offer
detailed discussions of truth and objectivity as well as an
account of the representational function of language in
terms of the formal-pragmatic framework he has developed.
In defending his post-Kantian pragmatism, Habermas draws on
both the continental and analytic traditions and endorses a
weak naturalism and a form of epistemological realism.

Subscriber Joachim Teipel offered a list of the chapters of
the German edication )File habermas.archive/habermas.0108,
message 114), some of which have been translated:

1. Hermeneutische und analytische Philosophie. Zwei
komplementaere Spielarten der linguistischen Wende.

2. Rationalitaet und Verstaendigung. Sprechakttheoretische
Erlaeuterungen zum Begriff der kommunikativen
Rationalitaet.

3. Von Kant zu Hegel. Zu Robert Randoms Sprachpragmatik.

4. Wege der Detranszendentalisierung. Von Kant zu Hegel und
zurück.

5. Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung. Zu Richard Rortys
pragmatischer Wende.

6. Richtigkeit versus Wahrheit. Zum Sinn der Sollgeltung
moralischer Urteile und Normen.

7. Noch einmal: Zum Verhaeltnis von Theorie und Praxis.

I suspect that the most important chapter, which has not
previously appeared in English, is ch. 6; and I expect that
Barbara Fultner has modified earlier translations in accord
with her translation project and JH's modifications of her
manuscript. I hope that JH has revised his chapters in
light of German reception or English reception of chapters
published elsewhere. 

Back a moment to "The Difficulty with Habermas": I'm
presently reading one of the previously-published chapters,
 "Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," and it reminds me of Habermas'
difficulty as a philosopher, which I welcome, not by some
illusion that difficulty is itself a sign of insight, but
because I recognize that philosophical research is
difficult, just as research in most disciplines can be
difficult. 

This is not merely a matter of "expert culture" (a keynote
of both TCA's practical interest---e.g., 2: 326-7), but of
the things themselves or issues. "Rorty's Pragmatic Turn"
becomes an occasion for JH to focus on theory of truth in a
way that is unprecedented, both for him and for philosophy,
in my view, and it suggests something about the nature of
philosophy itself as communicative action across time (via
the text): The philosopher is in a discourse that belongs
to itself, in a sense, independently of living
participants: Rorty presents a view that is a distillate of
philosophy in America as such, yet theory of truth for
Rorty is a conversation with Davidson and Putnam before
it's a conversation with Habermas, while Rorty's view of
Habermas, in "Universality and Truth" (1993) isn't even
available to JH, writing in 1996, such that JH is writing
to another Rorty (1979) whom he (JH) doesn't know
(evidently) is reading him (A shortened version of Rorty's
"U&T" was read in France at a symposium on himself and
Habermas, but JH is evidently unaware of this, since it
isn't cited in JH's review of Rorty's views). So, Rorty
catches up with JH catching up with him (Rorty's response
to JH's "Rorty's Pragmatic Turn" in _Rorty and His
Critics_, Blackwell, 2000), and are we about to get a book
in English that has an outdated reading of Rorty, 3 years
after Rorty has responded to JH?

This doesn't matter for one's interest in JH's view of
truth, which is my interest (I've never been much
interested in Rorty, though this should surprise me, given
my background, which seems to mirror Rorty's one generation
later). But the situation puts a aura on the discourse of
inquirers pursuing each other at distant removes from each
other. Putnam has distanced himself from "internal realism"
(_threefold cord_, Harvard 1999), but JH relies briefly on
Putnam's earlier view in "Rorty's Pragmatic Turn" (as does
Cristina Lafont, in her 1999 _The Linguistic Turn_), which
bears on the question of realism that is supposedly central
to JH's book. 

So, maybe we can get clear on the full contemporaneity of
the discourse by early 2004: JH's current views vis-a-vis
Putnam's current views; and Rorty's actual view of JH's
reading of him, mapped back into the issue of truth---which
is no mere academicism, I want to add: Since the human
condition is an evolutionary one, there is a "land" between
Rortyean "solidarity" among the liberals and Habermasian
universalism that must (I would argue) appreciate the
contingency in universalism itself---the evolutionarity of
knowledge, moral insight, and capacity for appreciation.
This is a very difficult, elusive matter. 

Gary






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