From: SUBTILE-AT-aol.com Date: Tue, 09 Aug 94 01:04:36 EDT Subject: Re: Habermas Responses to questions about 1) Habermas on praxis philosophy and 2) Habermas on Marx's place in the philosophy of social science. 1) Habermas objects to praxis philosophy because he doesn't like starting with the idea of society as a "mass subject." The "philosophy of the subject" is in Habermas's opinion inimical to the regulative ideal of an uncoerced social consensus because it attempts to do with the laboring subject what can only be done with the communicating subject. Habermas thinks that Marx explained that: "The same principle that is behind the achievements and the contradictions of modern society is also supposed to explain the transforming movement, the release of the rational potential of this society. However, Marx connects the modernization of society with an increasingly effective exploitation of natural resources and an increasingly intensive build-up of a global network of commerce and communication. This unfettering of productive forces must therefore be traced back to a principle of modernity that is grounded in the practice of a producing subject rather than in a reflection of a knowing subject." (p. 63 of PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY) Habermas objects to the joining of the "release of the rational potential of society" and the increase in the power of the productive forces of society because it results in the "utopia of social labor" -- the utopia of "working together" issuing from a "philosophy of the subject that locates reason in the purposive rationality of the acting subject instead of in the reflection of the knowing subject," (p. 65 PDM) whereas for Habermas, reason is more than just the direction of labor, and only the cognitive work done in approximations of uncoerced and fair argumentation (which can't, for him, be called "labor") will lead toward human emancipation. (Yes, I agree with Philip Goldstein's characterization of Habermas as projecting praxis philosophy as a false totalization.) The problem with this argument of H's, I think, that he then needs to find or create a utopian projection of his own to avoid being, by default, a negativistic tearer-down of utopias in the spirit of Horkheimer and Adorno. In an essay titled "The New Obscurity" in THE NEW CONSERVATISM, Habermas deals directly with what happens to the utopian impulse of modernity in our age of the retrenchment of utopian desire -- and all he can come up with in the essay is a lukewarm endorsement of the utopianism of Andre Gorz (whom you should all read, especially the CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC REASON). I suppose that if you have tenure like Habermas you don't need to be a utopian or even a social activist. The preconditions of the emergence of Habermas's ideal of fair argumentation across social boundaries, of course, are the end of the culture of oppression and the beginnings of a socialist movement. Habermas says little about this besides what he said in the last chapter of part 2 of THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION because he doesn't seem to think that it generates philosophical problems that he can solve. In fact, Habermas seems to be delimiting his focus as a professional philosopher, as one can gather by reading the essays in the recent collection JUSTIFICATION AND APPLICATION. Seyla Benhabib's SITUATING THE SELF contains many essays that try to tackle the problems of communicative action's contribution to emancipatory social progress. 2) Perhaps my comment on Habermas's position on "scientific Marxism" was too general to make any sense to Philip Goldstein. Habermas thought that Marx "loosely identified with empirical sciences" (p. 188 of ON THE LOGIC OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES) but that marxism was INSTEAD "guided by an emancipatory cognitive interest that has reflection as its aim and demands enlightenment about its own formative process" and was thus not invalidated by the Popperian critique of the social sciences as failing to meet the scientific criteria of proper empirical science which Popper himself leveled against marxism in part 2 of THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES. Marxism, Habermas argued, meets a different criterion than that which distinguishes empirical science, regardless of whether Marx himself was capable (by virtue of his placement in an era of intellectual history) of explaining this. -Samuel Day Fassbinder ------------------
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