> Ken... philosopher...
Nah. I wouldn't dare be so bold. I'm a religionist. I study religion. It just so happens that the world is full of theologians, my data.
> That's what I meant by necessarily assuming the possibility of mutual
understanding (hence all the Habermasology), and that's why I reckon the
occasional 'I don't get it' is okay - even if it looks rhetorical, it's
still a speech act with substance and regulative function.
Simple questions: do you think mutual understanding is possible? And I'm not talking about an agreement about what to make for dinner. What happens to us when we agree about something? What are the limits? the conditions? How do we know that we agree? What empirical conditions must be present for an agreement to be said to exist - from first, second, and third person perspectives?
Is it possible to intuite from within communicative relations the (ultimate) core of such relations without contradiction?
It seems to me that there is always a "vanishing mediator" in all of this. Whenever you try to illuminate something from within that thing, you need to break away from it (is it possible to make class struggle transparent to those who actually *experience* and *live* within actual class struggle?)(can you derive an ontology from within historical contingency?). You need to discard something in order to reach such a conclusion. Habermas denies "the real" of communication. The Real being a kernel that resists absolute transparency. Now, Habermas has explicitly denied that human beings can be transparent to one another. But this is curious, because if this is the case then the conclusions of the reconstructive sciences must be suspended. In other words, he can hypothetically say that their might be a universal core of communication, but he can't prove it. We can only "keep writing" about communication. In short, there is something fundamentally un-understandable about understanding. Which means, for all intents and purposes, that any agreement reached must be treated as suspect. We must tarry with the negative a bit longer. The conversation continues, and consensus taken to be a problematic burb.
My Lacanian point is this: what Habermas locates with his reconstructive sciences is a "master signifier" - a quilting point of all symbolic matrixes. For Habermas, this takes the form of a procedural understanding of rationality as a moral paradigm, in modern thought, in philosophical terms. In other words, Habermas has not "discovered" *the* moral point of view, but has unveiled the limits of the moral imaginary of a procedural democratic ethos. If read in this way, Habermas can be taken not to outline the final form of a democratic society, but the limitations of such a society.
"I think therefore I am."
- Descartes
"I think therefore there are unavoidable presuppositions of language from which any competent speaker in an unlimited communicative community can rationally derive the democratic ideals of autonomy and solidarity."
- paraphrased, Jurgen Habermas
ken