> ken the problem with this is that you are confusing his use of weber's
methodology--ideal typifications--with claims about how the world actually
is. and before you get your latex shorts in a knot, please read frank
hearn's _the dialectical uses of ideal types_.
Rubber shorts dear, rubber. I'll have to look at Hearn's work - but it sounds more like a critique than a sympathetic theoretical explanation. For Habermas, these spheres *must* be autonomous. I have a difficult time imagining what a theoretical ideal autonomous and dialectical typography would look like. If the there spheres are, in fact, dialectical, then they are not autonomous (one can't have aesthetic claims becoming objective claims and back again in a self-negating motion and call this autonomy)(at least it wouldn't resemble anything I've read so far).
> to speak theoretically necessarily means that we must clarify the muck,
> even if we know that it's much more confused and mixed up than that. we
> have no fucking choice here and you do it all the time yourself by
> insisting that certain terms mean what they mean and nothing else.
> similarly, you insist on using a film to teach Locke even though the film
> is polysemic could easily be used to illustrate a number of competing
> theoretical frameworks.
I never denied this. When Harry Met Sally illustrates John Locke, falling into marriage is like falling into civil society, it is useful pedagogy and I never claimed exlclusive rights to a singletrac reading (which would be rather Lockean of me).
> as rob says, no one escapes. habermas's hubris is our own.
I find it tragic that people ignore the secondary literature on Habermas. There is widespread disagreement with his model of the reconstructive sciences and his theory of language... and excellent reasons for disagreement. It is frankly bizarre that people keep reading Habermas without consideration of this material.
> no, not as the court of last resort. not at all. habermas repeatedly says
> that science *cannot* be an arbiter of moral disputes.
No, but the model for resolving moral disputes is *identical* to the scientific model. A truth claim is *analogous* to a normative validity claim. In other words, the procedure is identical even if the orientation isn't. Believe it or not, Habermas is arguing that scientific discourses harbour a *moral* element - in the form of argumentation. My point is that argumentation does not exhaust morality. Yes, we'll sort this all out - never totally procedurally, and yes, within language - but also with our bodies, fantasies and dreams. Again, Habermas grants *conceptual* privilege to communicative action but he lacks good reason to do so. He assumes it when he should be proving it. Yes, this is similar to Marx when Marx says something like, traditional economists assume what they should explain. Same deal.
> i beg of you to some day read alan wolfe on this in _Whose Keeper_.
Kell, maybe you can make a top ten list for me - this I absolutely must read if I'm to continue on pretending I'm a social theorist. Is this the same Wolfe who wrote an anarchist interpretation of Kant or am I missing up my Wolves.
> >it means that a consensus has been reached. In other words, successful
> >communication, for Habermas, *terminates* the conversation.
> no it doesn't. we go back to it. eternally and that's what it means to be
> human and to be free. haven't you read his earlier work on this?
After consensus, justification and application, we return to the lifeworld. In other words, the legitimation crisis is over when we all agree at any given point. Boom. It's gone. It sinks back into the lifeworld to be forgotten.
ken