Subject: Re: HAB: Third rock from the Sun
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 11:44:40 


Dear Martin,

>I might still be out of phase with this discussion, and I might sound very
>strange and out of the game, but nevertheless, I will contribute to it
>because some statements have inspired questioning and let's get it out!

I think this is EXACTLY the Habermasian value. The eternal dialectic of a 
species' conversation which underpins Habermas's pseudo- philosophy of 
Spirit beckons us to communicate. Habermas has achieved philosophical 
escstasy in *mating* Kant with Hegel.
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>I thought that it doesn't matter how much institutions stand far away from
>argumentative discussion (in the serious sense) because no matter how
>profound and deep you're in performative contradiction, you're still making
>reference to ideal agreement in order to make sense of it all. No logical
>circularity here in my humble opinion.


This is the critical tension of the *pragmatic* turn in my humble opinion.  
The *making sense of it all* still raises the ethics of the pragmatics 
determining the ethical/normative split which I think Ken is pointing to in 
previous posts.

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Isn't part of the issue here to do with the regress of Habermas's 
justificatory method. If the procedure of warrant-raising is based on 
socially acquired i.e normativised language skills, then from where can the 
injection of any sort of emancipatory consciousness occur?

Perhaps, unwillingly, ( and excuse me but I have just re-read Althusser on 
the function of ideology production vis a vis social integration) but 
Habermas's conservativism is becoming apparent. Now, I don't think this is 
necessarily a BAD (!!!) thing. The conservation of the Lifeworld against the 
colonisation of the Systemworld is primarily a conservative thesis. However, 
there is always call to question what mystification Habermas's act ( as an 
enterprise of philosophy) of enlightenment proffers?

This is what I take Martin to be partly meaning here:

> > Habermas is also proposing the creation of concrete
> > institutional norms, but these same norms are said to provide the 
>legitimate
> > grounds of those very institutions.
>
>Is this not interpreting Habermas in a positivistic sense? I thought that
>for Habermas, it was in the way that we justify the norms that we find
>grounds to build them. We are saying: we cannot make sense of any norms if
>we don't rationally accept and warrant arguments for and against them. Now
>for sure, some norms are already around when we say that, but it doesn't
>follow from those norms that we develop this justifying procedure for them.
>We may be already embedded in a particular form of life but this form of
>life is never a prison, because we can extend it beyond its own
>contradictions. We listen to counterarguments and provide new experience 
>for
>our form of life. Therefore, no prisons but the ones we build.

Yet I think the question:

How is this possible/ or not possible?

Worth posing. Doesn't this grant any possible space to the imaginary?
____________________________________________________________________

Reading this Martin, makes me think you have Marx's German Ideology in one 
hand and Habermas in the other:

>But this being said, I would agree that a floating point in Habermas'
>thought makes interpretation difficult. He refuses Apel's transcendantal
>justification in respect of normative standpoints for reason. Meanwhile, he
>makes a similar move when he says that agreement is the telos of language.
>This, he adds, is only an ideal pragmatic presupposition since we can 
>fairly
>suppose that our meanings always differ from time to time, and from one
>individual to another. But aren't those last statements as infaillible as
>Apel's transcendantal grounding? By saying that such statements are only
>quasi-transcendantal, Habermas leaves this question unanswered, and lets a
>very grave suspicion come in by the backdoor: could it be that a particular
>form of life is getting a transcendantal ticket, and therefore that a
>particular contingent and historical development is suspiciously slippering
>in a so-called universal moral development?

Now, now....get you to stake ;-)

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>By making a hard distinction betweeen moral and ethics, I think Habermas is
>only aggravating his case.
>
>Therefore, two options might help us out. The first would be to introduce
>radical pluralism all the way up to the justification stance. This would
>therefore put Habermas in Rorty's camp, and I find that unacceptable. But I
>leave this question open : can radical pluralism overcome Rorty's
>contradictions?

What are Rorty's contradictions, please?

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>In any case, the other way to overcome those tensions would
>be to carefully differentiate a structural point of view, which allows you
>to state a transcendantal grounding for making sense of argumentation 
>(hence
>the performative contradiction), from a particular form of life in which
>those transcendantal groundings are expressed. When Habermas says that
>agreement is the telos of language and that this differentiates moral from
>ethics (ethics limits the agreement to one between us, morality extends it
>ideally), then all Habermas would be doing is projecting a structure from
>his own point of view. Ir order to make sense of his structure, we have to
>make the same presuppositions. Hence, the metaphysical, or transcendantal,
>or ideal, STRUCTURAL GROUNDING. No particular form of life has received a
>transcendantal ticket, but those that excerpts themselves out of
>performative contradiction can hop on (one of the multiple) bandwagons of
>reason.

Martin, can you elaborate on this point, please? There still would seem to 
be a linguistic self referentiality to such a transcendental structuralism, 
but I fear I have failed to understand your insight here.

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I wonder if Ken's words could be rephrased in such a manner:

Just because human organisms speak in such a way that they speak in such a 
way....

>>Just because we speak, and because
> > language
> > has structures,

and this speaking ( noise making ) is sometimes accorded other noise making 
(sic) which goes like this:

> > cognitive development is a oneway street of
> > hierarchical forms ending with a non-contingent and transcendental
> > consciousness (if even in the weak sense).

Then, what other hermeneutical noises are we going to make? What's a norm? 
What's an institution? Grunt. Grunt.

Matthew Piscioneri
School of Philosophy
University of Tasmania


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