Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2003 19:51:52 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [HAB:] Re: Freedom Evolves: Habermas vs. Foucault [Matt]


Matt,

M>[Assuming it's OK to join this thread :-)]

G: Obviously. 

I hope that Rauno wasn’t offended by my joke that “You
Scandinavians complaining about having good things to say.”
Both Rauno and Antti had apologized for sending long
emails. But they should know that their postings were very
good ones, at least in the sense (but in other senses,
too!) that they were genuinely in dialogue with the issues
and the posts to which they were responding insightfully.
(I wonder whether apologies of that sort are a kind of
vanity: “Sorry to so effectively undermine your views,”
which they didn’t do. Wish they had; I want to learn from
interaction.)

Anyway, I can’t imagine why you would think it might not be
OK to join a thread in a discussion list that you’re
already an active member of----well, I regret to say I
*can* imagine why you would say “Assuming” etc., which is a
tacit way of saying: “I’m unsure whether it’s OK to join
this thread,” because, if you weren’t feeling some
hesitance of that sort, you’d just post your points. So,
maybe you’re ultimately saying: “Please respond”---or
“Please don’t regard me as if I haven’t joined the thread.”
But I know the feeling of being jokingly “miffed” (your
previous posting to Ali) about no response: I wrote a very
long posting to you mid-August, via the Yahoo! Group,
entitled “Environmental Thinking,” and you never even
acknowledged it, let alone answered my friendly questions
at the beginning about your work (or acknowledged my
extended effort of free time to turn you on to a fabulous
example of applied discursive pragmatics); maybe you found
my “cosmic” mood in the first third of the posting a
put-off. Sorry about that, then, but I avow a right to
creative writing. 

To you and others: If you can bear the first half of that
posting, I assure you that the discussion of the book
_Searching for Sustainability_ will be of interest to
anyone interested in the challenge of effectively applying
a progressive discursive perspective to real public policy
work. To save you time: Skip to paragraph 15, which begins:

> In _Searching for Sustainability: interdisciplinary
essays in the philosophy of conservation biology_
(Cambridge 
Studies in Philosophy and Biology, Cambridge U. Press,
2003; paperback), philosopher Bryan G. Norton shares his
extended discursive "experiment" of the 1990s striving to
be a bridge in a U.S. school of public policy.

The posting is:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/habermas/message/622

So, Matt, ;-) to you, too. 

-----------------------------------------------

M> Thought you got to the *heart* of the matter in this
post. 

G: Thanks much for your praise. 

M> So much in Habermas turns on his argument that the
subjective is constituted by the collective/social and vice
versa.

G: “Vice versa”?

M> One of the problems for JH is the infinite regress of
individual-to-social-to individual etc. Especially when in
_CES_ he prioritizes (in the causal sense) individual will
formation. 

G: If you really intend “the problems for JH” above rather
than something like “the problems I have with JH,” how is
it that JH has this problem? I don’t recall him writing
about infinite regress. I would agree that CES allows one
to make a case for a primacy of individual freedom for
social evolution---according with the value of mature
autonomy that JH overtly takes from Kant in _Theory and
Practice_ and _KHI_---but do you find a problem of infinite
regress in JH’s thinking? 

In fact, I can agree with you that there IS a problem of
infinite regress ascertainable in JH’s thinking, but JH
doesn’t have need to address it within the boundaries of
his project, which is about the bases of *public* role
competence (in CES). Yet, it seems to me that I have
pursued this chicken-egg issue all the way down, so to
speak (“down”?), and, in my view, it’s quite a well, which
I allude to from time to time: the nature of ontogeny, the
evolutionary (“life”) background of development (“world”).
I recall (again, as mentioned several years ago) Daniel
Stern’s outstanding clinical study _The Interpersonal World
of the Infant_ (Basic Books, 1985; 2000 paperback with a
long new “Introduction” which updates his clinical
perspective). It turns out---I would conclude (if I got
into this again)---that the “egg” comes first: Neonatal
temperament; comfort with curiosity; talent for finding
pattern, meaning, and significance; cognitive exploratory
energy, etc. that care promotes. Initiative is the basis of
understanding, as well as genesis of articulability,
creativity, and actualized potential for insight and
innovative productivity. Intelligence is not primordially
linguistic; it’s cognitive and intentional (rather than
primordially receptive. Primordially intentional
intelligence is primally receptive, I’d argue). 

Coincidently, I was looking today at a collection of essays
by the brilliant Rodolph Gasché, _Of Minimal Things:
studies on the notion of relation_ (Stanford, 1999), which
examines, literary-philosophically, the phenomenology of
relationship. His keynote is that relation is
“being-toward,” in the manner of intentionality (and
Heidegger’s “therebeing” or Dasein). As the infant is “in
relation” only inasmuch as s/he *reaches* (in a broadly
figurative sense) to find pattern or to construe, so too (I
would argue; not Gasché’s point) INTERsubjectivity is no
better (in quality of relationship) than what
*subjectivities* of the “inter-“ness bring to it. A good
marriage, for example, isn’t constituted by the
“institution,” nor by available roles of, say, deep
friendship or lifeworld partner, lover, shared homemaking,
or parenting; rather, all this is constituted by the
quality of individuality---individuation, subjectivity,
self, person---brought to the role. Indeed, anyone who
conceives of partnership as a *mere* role has an ingenuine
sense of partnering (or any other mode of the
“relationship”---that ship of relations sailing Time). *In*
our subjectivity is the origin of humanity, I would
argue---and I find such a view fully commensurable with
Habermas’ “human interest” in, say, fostering progressive
democracy at the micro-level as well as macro- (though I
have a different sense of his “ethic of the species” than
he does). 

But the “well” is a dark lens: What is the evolutionary
basis of intelligence that gives us language? The “infinite
regress” turns into the “nature-nurture” issue that turns
into the genome vs. niche issue of eonic selectivity, whose
dimly available history is somehow embodied in the
learnability of the wide-eyed neonate, which parenting
often and tragically suppresses under conditions of poverty
(and lost intergenerational parenting wisdom). 

M> So the question arises how did those individuals in
early modernity develop the requisite volitional conditions
for autonomy in order to break free of the dogmatic
totality of theological reason?

G: Obviously a good question. I don’t know. We all have our
views, I guess. And one would have a hard time addressing
this question in terms of Habermas’ work, perhaps. 

Coincidently, I came across a new book yesterday that
argues that *Christianity* provided the resources for
tolerance and freedom in early modernity, *rather than*
secularization. Inasmuch as that’s true, this would counter
JH’s secularist reading of modernity. *But*, I’m happy to
crow, that newly published view accords with a claim I’ve
made several times that the *humanistic* roots of
Christianity---born from *Hellenism*, during the east
Mediterranean conception of the notion of “Christ”, and
inherited by (resurrected in) Renaissance humanism’s
transformation (evolution) of classicism, whose atmosphere
(Christian humanism) was Martin Luther’s (originating in
Amsterdam)---is the basis of European cultural modernity.
Cultural modernity is a distant child of transformed
(evolved) classicism. Anyway, the new book is: _How the
Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West_, by Perez
Zagorin (Princeton, 2003). Says the book jacket: “…Here we
see how sixteenth- and seventeenth century
thinkers…contributed far more than did political expediency
or the growth of religious skepticism to advance the cause
of toleration. Reading these thinkers---from Erasmus
and…More to …Milton and…Locke, among others---Zagorin
brings to light a common, if unexpected, thread: concern
for the spiritual welfare of religion [i.e., the humanism
of Christ’s humanity] itself weighed more in defense of
toleration than did any secular or pragmatic arguments.”
(Yikes, Juergen, the man’s got 50 pages of discursive
footnotes beyond the 300 page argument.) 

M> Perhaps they indulged in the emancipatory aesthetic of
self-creation ;-). 

G: Or “self-formative” “care for the self”.

M> …how does Foucault's aesthetic of self creation match
with Habermas’s intersubjectively constituted *self* and
*collective*? In the final analysis not all that well I
would suggest. Thankfully.

G: I tend to disagree (“tend,” not being well-read in
Foucault---but not unread!). Habermas’ intersubjectively
constituted self is a *pragmatic* metatheory which is
commensurable with whatever turns out to be the real
basis---ontogenically--of creative selfhood. (Why
“Thankfully”?)

M> In a sense Habermas's and Foucault's *audiences* and
objectives are VERY divergent, and this is something that
is underappreciated in the literature contrasting and
comparing them. …

G: I agree.  

M> For whilst they both share an interest in the
critical-emancipatory project ….

G: *A* project, at best, since JH’s project of contributing
to the project of modernity is the basis for his post-70s
sense of critical-emancipatory project. Ergo:

M> …their objectives (re-practical import of their work)
are widely divergent. Habermas seeks to re-assure the
institutional framework of social governance in advanced
capitalist democratic societies (not a bad thing to do), ….

G: Though “re-assure” would be a conservative endeavor.
Isn’t “improve” more accurate? Actually, improvement that
is fundamental is progressive. Deliberative democracy is
not a rhetorical resort (, James).

Thanks for the inspiration!

Gary






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