Subject: [HAB:] HAB: "transcendence from within"; "red meat"; links
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 09:45:34 -0600 


I'm not aware of Habermas using the catchy (as these things go) phrase
"transcendence from within" prior to the essay with this phrase in the title
(English translation in _Habermas and Public Theology_ and _Religion and
Rationality_) and the roughly contemporaneous (1991) Ch. 1.2 of _Between
Facts and Norms_ and the end of "'To Seek to Salvage an Unconditional
Meaning Without God is a Futile Undertaking': Reflections on a Remark of Max
Horkheimer" (in _Justification and Application_ and _Religion and
Rationality_).  However, the context in which Habermas uses this phrase is
to describe the context transcendence (or Peircian moment of
unconditionality) of universal validity claims, which are nonetheless raised
here and now in real discourses.  As far as I know, Habermas's earlier
formulations of this idea were in terms of the Janus-faced character of
validity claims, although he used the phrase "context-transcendence" in
essays from the 1980s (in _MCCA_ and J&A) and possibly earlier (it sounds
like something we'd find in _Legitimation Crisis_).

Here's some "red meat":  Is cannibalism that is based on mutual consent
morally permissible according to discourse ethics?  If so, is this a problem
for discourse ethics, given our presumably settled convictions against this
practice?  http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_01_05_04td.html  My guess is
that the line of reasoning that would be taken by most of those who would
defend discourse ethics against the challenged posed by this "problem" is to
question the genuineness of the consent of the victim, his or her
"need-interpretive competence."  What interests me most about this first
line of reasoning is a tension it exposes in discourse ethics between what
could be called a liberal approach of accepting people's own self-professed
preferences at face value and the approach of what might be called ideology
critique.  The liberal approach may be naive in the face of delusions,
ideologies and "systematically distorted communication," but the approach of
ideology critique is hard to operationalize in a discourse theory of
justification that relies on contributions from, and consensus among, actual
participants.  I suspect that the best that can be done here is a basically
"liberal" approach that puts its hopes on the transformative power of
discourse under idealizing conditions to overcome ideological and other
distortions.  A second line of reasoning might question whether cannibalism
is really acceptable to all those affected, which include others besides the
cannibal and his or her meal.  A third Habermasian consideration is whether
cannibalism, like genetic manipulation in Habermas's cautious view, is
impermissibly instrumentalizing and incompatible with autonomy.  I prefer a
fourth line of reasoning to defend discourse ethics against the challenge
posed by the problem of consenting cannibals: To recognize the prohibition
against cannibalism as an ethical restriction (i.e., valid "for us" given
who, deep down, we are and want to be) instead of a moral restriction.  The
intensity of our (presumed) rejection of cannibalism might make it seem like
such a restriction should have an unconditional character and thus be a
moral norm.  ("Unconditional" is not the same as "categorical" or
"absolute", which does not admit exceptions such as when the only
alternative is starvation, so discourse ethics here refines Kant a bit by
allowing for unconditional norms to be prima facie valid and introducing a
lower level of norm application in which unconditional particular judgments
can be rationally tested.  The unconditional character of specifically moral
norms and judgments refers to how they are meant to obligate us regardless
of  what our identities and goals happen to be.  Also, I think
unconditionality, not universality, is the more fundamental characteristic
of narrowly *moral* norms and judgments, whose validity claims are universal
-- i.e., meant to be transcultural -- because they are unconditional, not
vice-versa.)  But Habermas is right to point out (I forgot where) that we
often feel more strongly about ethical considerations than moral ones,
presumably because of the connection of our ethical values with our identies
(i.e., our values, commitments, strong preferences, second-order desires,
etc. are partly constitutive of our identities).  So the intensity with
which we may feel that cannibalism is impermissible is compatible with its
prohibition being ethical rather than moral in character.  So does the fact
that this prohibition is an archaic taboo that is still valid for us.  Of
course, other options include accepting cannibalism and rejecting discourse
ethics -- both unpalatable.

Text of  Habermas's letter regarding Du-Yul Song:
http://www.uni-muenster.de/PeaCon/Song/habermas-22-12.htm

Article about Habermas's dialogue with Cardinal Ratzinger:
http://www.merkur.de/aktuell/cw/gg_040402.html

Mary V. Rorty, Review of Habermas's _The Future of Human Nature_:
http://ndpr.icaap.org/content/archives/2003/12/rorty-habermas.html

Agata Bielik-Robson, "Blessing of the Limits: Helmuth Plessner's
Contribution to the Habermas - Taylor Debate on the Nature of Human
Freedom":  http://www.omp.org.pl/bielik.htm

Paul McLeary, "Fighting terrorism with democracy: A philosopher challenges
Bush doctrine," review of Benjamin Barber, _Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism
and Democracy_:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/04
/RVG5I4115C1.DTL

Richard Wolin, "Kant at Ground Zero" (start of an article in _The New
Republic_ available by subscription only):
https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20040209&s=wolin020904

Harry Frankfurt, Lecture 1, "Taking Ourselves Seriously":
http://www.law.upenn.edu/academics/institutes/ilp/200304papers/frankfurtpape
r1.pdf

Harry Frankfurt, Lecture 2, "Getting It Right":
http://www.law.upenn.edu/academics/institutes/ilp/200304papers/frankfurtpape
r2.pdf

Interview with Luc Ferry, "Secularity does not mean the end of the sacred":
http://www.france.diplomatie.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/IDEES/FERRY/ferry.html

Simon Blackburn, Review of _Letters, 1925-1975, Hannah Arendt and Martin
Heidegger_, Edited by Ursula Lutz, Translated by Andrew Shields:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=4eD02UM/PTtBwk94RLRX/V=
Adam Kirsch, "Hot for Teacher":
http://www.nextbook.org/features/feature_kirsch.html

Liam Murphy, "Institutions and the Demands of Justice":
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/murphy/papers/justint.pdf

Brian Caterino, "Bad Max: The New Wave of Weber Studies" (review of The
Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment. Eds. Asher
Horowitz and Terry Maley):
http://www.sicetnon.cogito.de//artikel/rezensio/weber.htm

Bernd Goebel, "Die Quintessenz nachmetaphysischer Bioethik. Anmerkungen zu
Jürgen Habermas: Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur":
http://www.sicetnon.cogito.de//artikel/rezensio/bioethik.htm

The 2 preceding essays are from an online journal that looks interesting
(but mostly in German): _Sic et Non_:
http://www.sicetnon.cogito.de//Index.html

Amartya Sen, "The Social Demands of Human Rights":
http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2003_fall/sen.html

Roger Scruton, "Immanuel Kant and the Iraq War":
http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/ViewPopUpArticle.jsp?id=5&articleId=17
49

"Europe's Greatest Thinker -- A Prussian Wild Man":
http://europe.tiscali.co.uk/index.jsp?section=lifestyle&level=preview&conten
t=172713

Similarly, "Kant's Wild Years":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4856783-103532,00.html

Joschka Fischer on Kant:
http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1441_A_1111992,00.html

Patrick Capps, "The Kantian Project in Modern International Legal Theory"
(review of Fernando Teson, _A Philosophy of International Law_):
http://ejil.org/journal/Vol12/No5/br1.html#TopOfPage

Nico Krisch, "Legality, Morality, and the Dilemma of Humanitarian
Intervention after Kosovo," _European Journal of International Law_ 13:1 (
):  http://ejil.org/journal/Vol13/No1/br1.html#TopOfPage

New York University 2003 Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social
Philosophy (links to papers by Dworkin, Guenther, Okin and others):
http://www.law.nyu.edu/clppt/program2003/readings/index.html

William N. Eskridge, Jr., "Lawrence's Jurisprudence of Tolerance Judicial
Review to Lower the Stakes of Identity Politics":
http://www.law.nyu.edu/faculty/workshop/spring2004/eskridge.pdf

Danny Priel, "Legal Realism and Legal Positivism Reconsidered Again":
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1534/JDG/priel.pdf

Jed Rubenfeld, _The Structure of American Constitutional Law_, Ch. 5:
"Interpreting Commitments":
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/mainpages/curriculum/colloquium/Jed%20Rubenf
eld.pdf

And an article abstract::
Title: The epistemic significance of consensus Author(s): Aviezer Tucker
Source: Inquiry Volume: 46 Number: 4 Page: 501 -- 521 DOI:
10.1080/00201740310003388 Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis
Group Abstract: Philosophers have often noted that science displays an
uncommon degree of consensus on beliefs among its practitioners. Yet
consensus in the sciences is not a goal in itself. I consider cases of
consensus on beliefs as concrete events. Consensus on beliefs is neither a
sufficient nor a necessary condition for presuming that these beliefs
constitute knowledge. A concrete consensus on a set of beliefs by a group of
people at a given historical period may be explained by different factors
according to various hypotheses. A particularly interesting hypothesis from
an epistemic perspective is the knowledge hypothesis: shared knowledge
explains a consensus on beliefs. If all the alternative hypotheses to the
knowledge hypotheses are false or are not as good in explaining a concrete
consensus on beliefs, the knowledge hypothesis is the best explanation of
the consensus. If the knowledge hypothesis is best, a consensus becomes a
plausible, though fallible, indicator of knowledge. I argue that if a
consensus on beliefs is uncoerced, uniquely heterogeneous and large, the gap
between the likelihood of the consensus given the knowledge hypothesis and
its likelihoods given competing hypotheses tends to increase significantly.
Consensus is a better indicator of knowledge than "success" or "human
flourishing".





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