File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2003/habermas.0310, message 71


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

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