Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 13:52:36 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HAB:] Ontogeny of good "moral" motivation


A little preface: I responded off-list to Sue's
concern about my "thoughtless" "rambling",
courteously, I believe. 

Sue, I didn't bother to mention that I'm far into a
project that is pervasively Habermasian, yet in my own
idiom---maybe it's even post-Habermasian---such that I
sometimes appropriate others' evocative interests into
online journaling, part of the ongoing development of
my project. Thanks for stimulating yesterday's
journaling. You may avoid suffering via your
delete-unread option, of course. You'll probably find
the following insufferable.

end of little preface

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Thinking about the ontogenic basis of ethicality is
very, very important to me, though I've not much
addressed that via Habermasian lists (nor any list,
actually). I put a lot of time into that issue during
the early '90s, in light of:

•  _The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant:
symbiosis and individuation_, Margaret Mahler (Basic
Books, 1975, now reprinted through Perseus, which
bought Basic Books)
• _The Interpersonal World of the Infant: a view from
psychoanalysis and developmental psychology_, Daniel
Stern (Basic, 1985; new Perseus paperback edition
2000, with a long, new research-updating
"Introduction")
• and other influences, especially in developmental
Analytical psychology, which is a hybrid of
cognitive-developmental psychology and Jungian
hermeneutics. 

But, again, I haven't made much occasion for
furthering that via Habermas lists, though I've posted
some notes in that area, e.g., "Developmental
cognition" in 1999:

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/cgi-bin/spoons/archive_msg.pl?file=habermas.archive/habermas.9902&msgnum=7&start=719&end=951

In the 1980s, I worked extensively with teens at
Berkeley High School, overtly applying earlier
doctoral work on Habermas to the study of adolescent
development and the grassroot dynamics of educational
reform, especially via (1) the early 1980s' federal
implementation of revolutionary "special education"
legislation written in the late 1970s; and via (2) the
high professional interest in  educational reform of
the 1980s. 

I report this by way of preface to including here the
short draft of a posting not sent yesterday,
coincidently written before Sue's emphatic note, so it
was done in follow-up to earlier journaling yesterday;
it had the subject line "P.S., re: Coping with ethical
akrasia." It's a little out of place now, but it
provides a context I want to pick up today in a
different key. 

So....

Saturday
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Referring to "getting highly self-identical" may seem
obtuse, but what I have in mind is quite average. 

There's a required course at Berkeley High School
called "Social Living," affectionately called "sex,
drugs, and the law," which is a no-holds-barred chance
for teens to work with Whatever through straight-talk
curriculum, private journals exchanged with the
teacher, and dramatically candid classroom discussion.
Nancy Rubin, who taught the course for many years,
finally wrote a book about her years of Social Living,
with the evocative title _Ask Me If I Care_, which is
the point of this little story. That title captures, I
think, the identity-in-difference reality of teen
identity formation. At heart the teen *wants* to be
asked whatever, though s/he may treat others' concerns
like "I couldn't care less". In that common kind of
atttude—"Whatever!"—the teen is living a generative
dynamism, if you will, of the question "What do I
really care about?" 

In countless unspoken ways, teens say "if you don't
call on me to stand for what I care about, then who
cares?!"

We grow up in part living out a mirrorplay of who "I"
am and what "I" care about, be it love that lasts or
knowledge that works, be it musical appeal or some
calling. Binding identity formation to a large scale
of care is a keynote of growing up well and, later, a
life that can make a difference. 

The "distance" between self-interest and humanitarian
care can become very short existentially (say, living
in Witness or Nearness to the body of humanity),
though long developmentally (i.e., growing up in one's
own way). 

----back to Sunday
again--------------------------------------------------

Adult ease of finding one's self-image entwined with
an elaborated sense of humanitarian care implies
various identity-formative successes at the various
stages of education. This is a valid research area;
e.g.:

•  _The Moral Self_, ed. Gil G. Noam, MIT Press, 1993.
See esp. "The Uniting of Self and Morality in the
Development of Extraordinary Moral Commitment," by
Anne Colby and William Damon
• _Competence and Character through Life_, Anne Colby
et al., Chicago, 1998, which includes issues of
motivation to be an active citizen (i.e., to "be
political").

Caring about oneself in caring about one's life in
caring about the world of one's life in caring about
the others in one's world may come to depend on what
world one's life cares to imply---what lifeworld "I"
am. Thus, a lot might be done with the notion of
natural life and individuated world via a deepening of
Habermas's sense of lifeworld beyond Piaget (outdated
for cognitive psychology) and Mead (misread by
Habermas). 

Habermas's sense of "individuation through
socialization" importantly seeks to capture such an
interest in growing up to care deeply and largely. But
such growing up is also a matter of socialization
through individuation, maybe (I tirelessly reiterate)
more a matter of individuation than socialization, as
far as "moral" motivation is the matter at hand. 

Anyway, caring about the world generally is not a
stretch for healthy identity formation, *given* decent
parenting and decent schooling. 

The structuring of that "given"ness is the condition
for the possibility of sustained humanitarian care. I
identify this with Habermas's recent notion of the
"ethic of the species" (_The Future of Human Nature_,
Polity Press 2003, ch. 2: "The Debate on the Ethical
Self-Understanding of the Species"), and I'm working
to give his notion a non-deontic basis. 

Linda Zagzebski notes, in beginning the "Preface" of
her new _Divine Motivation Theory_(Cambridge, 2004,
paperback) that "there are two very different
sensibilities out of which moral discourse and even
entire moral theories arise. One is the idea that
morality attracts. The other is the idea that morality
compels. The former focuses on value, the latter on
obligation. The former is optimistic enough to think
that human beings are drawn to morality by nature and
by the good and bad features of the world. The latter
is pessimistic enough to think that only law---which
is to say, force---can be the source of morality. This
is not a negligible difference; it grounds the
difference between virtue theories and duty theories."


Both she and I (with many others) opt for the
former---though I would give her "general framework
that can have a naturalistic form" a deeper
anthropological basis that, contrary to her design,
grounds *her* "strong form of
virtue-theory-with-a-theological-foundation" [my
hyphens] in a deeper, philosophically anthropological
sense of "attract"ion, post-Habermas. Philippa Foot's
_Natural Goodness_ (Oxford 2001) works for me, as far
as it goes (not far enough). 

Yet, the persisting gravity of theological thinking
can't be overstated, as a matter of geopolitics, as
well as within thoroughly modern societies (which
Habermas's recent work attests; e.g., ch. 3 of _The
Future..._, "Faith and Knowledge"). 

The so-called Question of Being endures, especially
post-ontotheologically (i.e., without theological
grounding, the Question *then* gets *really*
appealing). In any case, the Question calls to the
depth of self and belongs to everyone. 

I wouldn't pursue that in terms of Heidegger's _Being
& Time_ (neither would Heidegger, were he alive). The
Question doesn't belong to Heidegger (a key point of
his "path"). But as far as he's concerned, his work
after the mid-1940s is ultimately about how to go
about re-thinking and re-writing that which is taken
to heart in _B&T_'s idiom, it's 1920s thematology. A
21st century way of going into the Question can't be
much like another _Being & Time_. 

Anyway, the Question endures "across" the eternal
return of the "same" growing up. It can always appeal
to your so-called soul or whatever.  

Ending midstream, as always,

Gary









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