Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 16:30:44 -0800
Subject: Re: HAB: Language and Institution


Dear Gary:

Since you agree, I will not reply. I will nod. Only one comment.

In many of his interview, especially those collected in the volume edited
by Peter Dews, published with Verso, second edition a few years ago
(Solidarity and Autonomy, I think is the title), Habermas talks about
Heidegger's influence on his thought.

See also his essay on Heidegger which served as the introduction to the
Victor Farias book on Heidegger and the Nazis. You will note Habermas's
deep reverence for the pre-1933 Heidegger, basically the Heidegger of Sein
und Zeit. 

The essay in question is "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger
Controversy from a Heideggerian Perspective" in Critical Inquiry, 15
(1989): 431-56. The essay was reprinted in his _The New Conservatisms:
Cultural Criticism and the Historian's Debate_

Interestingly,  Habermas criticism of Heidegger in PDM are aimed at the
post-Turn Heidegger, the Heidegger after his rejection of SuZ. So, we have
to be careful what kind of anti-pathy toward Heidegger we attribute to
Habermas. Now, on the other hand, this would make an interesting article:
Habermas relationship to Heidegger. For Habermas really thinks that there
were two Heidegger, an idea which is become more and more unteneable, and
has received a lot of criticism from committed Heideggerians.


At 04:08 PM 11/29/00 -0800, you wrote:
>
>--- Eduardo Mendieta <mendietae-AT-usfca.edu> wrote ("Re: Language is
>not an institution...."):
>
>>... We ought not to forget that Habermas identified himself as a
>Heideggerian Hermeneuticist....
>
>This is a very interesting thing to "remember", since JH is widely
>regarded as antipathic toward Heidegger (e.g., _Philosophical
>Discourse of Modernity_[PDM]). I've always wanted to believe that JH
>was basically influenced by Heidegger (not just secondarily
>influenced during a Schillerian youth), but I've "believed" this not
>on the basis of anything Habermas, to my knowledge, *said* (or
>wrote). 
>
>> ....What is at stake in this tradition is a notion of language as
>Welterschliessenden (World-Disclosing). Language is apophantic, or
>the cite [sic! Derrida lives] of epiphany, of aletheia....
>
>I'm in accord with this, re: language--but one sees Habermas
>distancing himself from this in _PDM_. Open to the "poetic" in
>principle, Habermas seems practically (in all cases) to keep distant
>from a poeisis that can lead to political aesthetics, which leads to
>the German Problem--or at least, this is what I've guessed.  
>
>The challenge, then, is to clarify how language is constitutive (or
>world-disclosive) without political overtones. This requires a clear
>differentiation between the communicative and world-disclosive
>potential of language (which, by the way, a language-as-institution
>thesis dangerously occludes--conversely from poietic occlusion--by
>absorbing world-disclosure into the accountability/responsibility
>domain of communicative life, which ontologizes reason, beyond
>pragmatic interests). JH has always granted that there's more to life
>than what's relevant to communicative action, but only what's
>relevant to communicative action can figure into a good *social*
>life, which is JH's discursive "star".  
>
>> ....Interestingly, Apel has attempted to take the conservative
>discourse of Gehlen and reformulate it in terms of language as the
>meta-institution of all institutions. 
>
>And Searle appears to echo this meta-ism in _The Construction of
>Social Reality_ chapter on language, also missing (in his response)
>the point of JH's critical remark against Searle's hyper-institution.
>
>> In short: I think Habermas refused to accept the simile or analogy
>> because it is so tainted with conservative undertones.
>
>Yeah: Assilimating world distinctions to hegemony of the Given
>(concealing as well a late-Heideggerian realization of the Giving).
> 
>> What Apel meant was that Gehlen's notion of the meta-institution
>was
>> actually executed by language, but so long as we understand
>language in an exact transcendental-philosophical sense....
>
>Searle's transcendentality is his theory of mind, which he
>understands to be ontologically prior to language, not by the way...
>
>> As the institution of all institutions,as the grammar of all
>institution, as the deep syntax of all discourses and instititions of
>discourses. 
>
>But, Searle might claim, any *understanding* of mind AS mind--let
>alone philosophy of mind--is immediately confronted with its
>linguistic relativity, hence the centrality of language *as*
>institution (which is the extent of his claim about language in
>_Construction of Social Reality_, I believe).
>
>> And, moreover, this very meta-institution [now turning Edurardo's
>comments about Apel to commentary about Searle as well], a
>transcendental apriori, that allows for self-reflexivity and
>self-creativity. 
>
>However, though...
>
>> Language is...the meta-institution of all institutions, [and] also
>the institution of all emancipatory discourse.
>
>...it doesn't follow that language itself is essentially an
>institution (not that Eduardo is commenting against his own email
>Subject line). Without being reducible to instiutionality, language
>still expresses the metainstitutionality of linguistic relativity in
>communicative life.
>
>> This  aspect is not separate but integral to language itself, which
>is what Apel and Bhler criticized against Habermas's _K&HI_
>
>Inappropriately, in my view, since a fullness of institutionality is
>not concealed by the practical interest in KHI; yet, the practical
>interest of *knowledge* (which is potentially evolutionary) cannot be
>grasped institutionally--evolution requires the possibility of
>trans-metainstitutionality, in the sense of the possibility of
>(re)paradigm freedom (or whatever).
>
>> 
>> Would Habermas accept the image [of metainstitution] today? Thirty
>years later? I think not. 
>
>I agree. But he might accept the kind of complementarity that I'm
>sketching above.
>
>> I think that he would resist the attempt to attribute the
>properties
>and functions that ought to be performed by real institutions [to
>language], and conversely, I think he is interested that we see
>institutions for what they are, namely hybrids of the normative and
>the instrumental...
>
>Again, I agree. (And I've snipped all of Eduardo's comments on false
>consciousness because I can think of nothing to add. I just totally
>agree.)
>
>> Sorry, but I have to go pick up my kids.
>
>A clear instance of giving the institution of family (whose deeply
>embodied affectivity can't be reduced to linguisticality) priority
>over the institution of discursive interplay. I suppose your "sorry"
>is a postconventional exit. :->
>
>Having no kids of "pick up", I exit, Stage 7 (I wish).
>
>Gary
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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> 
Eduardo Mendieta
Assistant Professor
Philosophy Department
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, CA 94117-1080

Tel: (415) 422-6313
Fax: (415) 422-2346




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