Justice & the General Will

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Feb 3 16:18:43 PST 2000


Carrol:
>> In other
>> words, Habermas's "ideal speech situation" and "lifeworld" are dialectical
>> twins (individualism and organicism) that exist to obscure the primary &
>> secondary contradictions of the bourgeois civil society: class, gender,
>> race, and so on.
>
>This relationship between individualism and organicism (even specialized
>versions of organicism, as in organic conceptions of poems) is something
>I've been convinced of for a quarter of a century but have never quite
>been able to explicate to my own satisfaction. You are probably right
>in labelling them as dialectical twins -- but I'd like to see this claim
>worked out in more detail than I've ever been able to.

Peter Hallward writes in "The Singular and the Specific," _Radical Philosophy_ 99 (Jan/Feb 2000):

***** To individuate any one 'small' unit as radically unique (as either 'identity-with-itself' _or_ as pure 'other-of-itself') is simultaneously to refer it back, via some kind of more or less immediate derivation, to one creative movement, be it Reason (D'Alambert/Spinoza), Vitality (Deleuze/Bergson) or Spirit (Zizek/Hegel)....For instance: the radical particularity of Spinoza's modes, like that of Leibniz's monads, refers directly back to the univocity of their substance and cause, as so many 'degrees' of a divine intensity.... *****

In the case of Habermas, the dialectical twins of individualism and organicism appear as follows:

***** Habermas argues that individuals and, by analogy, societies undergo a process of moral-cognitive development from pretraditional through traditional to posttraditional consciousness. Current levels of learning are reflected in their basic structures and core values. According to Habermas, expansion of the productive forces cannot explain the development of intersubjective capacities. Interaction (or communicative action) follows its own evolutionary path. This means that class conflict no longer is the motive force in history. Societies are now the bearers of evolution and individuals are integrated into them. (Nancy S. Love, "What's left of Marx?" _The Cambridge Companion to Habermas_, ed. Stephen K. White [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1995]) *****

Yoshie



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