From: "matthew piscioneri" <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: [HAB:] Re: Rational Barbarians? [Antti] Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 23:28:44 +0000 I agree with you Gary: Ali and Antii's posts have raised a set of intriguing issues. On the one hand Ali's point that fascism is not necessarily *irrational* (nor *democracy* rational?) resonates. On the other hand, Antii's point that there is a substantive set of ineradicable reasons why we recognize the moral horror of the Holocaust. Re-Ali: isn't applying *rational* to *nazism* a sort of contradiction? In other words, if nazism is rational then it can't be nazism. depends on the *rationality* of course: administrative reason, purposive reason. How does the switch over from a benign *administrative reason* to a instrumental-administrative reason occur? When it is placed in the service of... irrationalism? I don't know. Fishing around for answers as this type of issue IS perplexing. Habermas's project is guided by his moral anxieties: IMO, it underscores the entire corpus of his work. One other tidbit; in an essay on Horkheimer published in German in 1990 Habermas continues to display his unease with aspects of Dialectic of Enlightenment-era material when he comments on this remark also from “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality”: "In Sade as in Mandeville, private vice constitutes a predictive chronicle of the public virtues of the totalitarian era. Not to have glossed over or suppressed but to have trumpeted far and wide the impossibility of deriving from reason any fundamental argument against murder fired the hatred which the progressives (and they precisely) still direct against Sade and Nietzsche." (1995: 118) In response Habermas writes: ‘I have to admit that this remark irritates me now no less than it did almost four decades ago when I first read it.’ (1993: 134). Habermas continues to a *new* _Dialectic of Enlightenment_. MattP _________________________________________________________________ Chat via SMS. Simply send 'CHAT' to 1889918. More info at http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilemania/MoChat.asp?blipid=6800 --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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