> we--you n me--have an ideal of what friendship ought to be like.
friendship as a social institution.... as a social
institution it exists in so far as ideals are conveyed
through various kinds of practices.
Sure. But, if we were Habermasians - we might understand friendship like this: every friendship must make unavoidable presuppositions like:
> the contemp ideal is prob something like this: friends
don't use each other as means to ulterior ends.
So, from our friendship we can derive the principle (F).
Every valid friendship has to fulfill the following condition: (F) All affected [friends] can accept the consequences and the side effects of not using one another... and still remain friends.
Furthermore, (F) is made possible by (U)
(U) Only those friendships can claim to be friendships that meet with the approval of both friends in they capacity as participants in said friendship.
Therefore, together, (F)(U) guarantee the possibility of a friendship that lasts forever. Friends are not just buddies, or chums, or close ties, but form a binding / bonding relationship from which all other relationships are derived (even unnatural relationships like "family" or "employer / employee").
> in fact, he might annoy the shit out of me in many ways,
but i put up with some of that because i enjoy his company
for other reasons. now, i supposed lacan/zizek would like
to talk about pleasure, neurosis, etc and so forth....
Bingo. "I enjoy." We don't necessarily communicate with one another as the means to reach an impartial decision, coordinate our actions within an unlimited communicative community and strive to keep western rationality alive. We communicate because using language is exciting.
BTW - friendship has Aristotle written all over it (Nicomachean Ethics).
> >I'm totally cool with ideals. But *not* as universals.
> and yet, habermas isn't claiming them *as* universals in the sense you
> mean. again, this is why i say you have to see hab as a sociologist too,
> not only a philosopher. right or wrong, sociology did try to deal with
> the epistemological conundrums kant left us by negotiating the
> opposition--mediating it by bringing in the *social* which kant leaves out.
> scottish enlightenment comes into play here....
But he is claiming that communicative action leads to impartiality in moral decision making...
> ummmm well i don't think i've put it in quite the same way as you did
> above. but yeah.... read steven lukes on teh sociology of morality
Lukes argues that Habermas's theory of com act is simply a souped up version of instrumental reason.
> no. but the point is this: why celebrate the fundamental opacity
> required by the ego such that you then generalize this process in a way
> that describes how social institutions, social process, social structures
> work?
It isn't so much a celebration as it is a fundamental antagonism that haunts the idea of reason. An antagonism that makes plurality possible and an antagonism that Habermas has to deny.
> however, when you complain about a positive dialectics [??] as only capable
> of totalitarianism, universalism, and so on and so forth, then you are in
> some sense celebrating it and elevating opacity to the level of a
> transcendent universal in its own right. it seems to me that it's all
> unmoored from any meaningful historical context. i disagree with yoshie
> re gender/sex and psychoanalysis. simply pointing out the problem isn't
> necessarily reproducing it. but i think it matters *how* you point it out
> and it matters *how* you theorize sex/gender.
I'll have to think about this ...
> ....say the consensus we achieve over a common project
like building a web page, somehow or other makes moral
consciousness disappear. does it?
It does if we think the web page we've agreed to build is the best of all possible web pages...
ken