>>The idealization of reason-giving with freedom, equality, autonomy,
>>fairness, etc. is not inherent in communicative processes
>>everywhere at all times.
>
>Check the archives. If there isn't an anticipation of understanding,
>then we're not talking about communication. See, I just enacted an
>idealization. I anticipate that you'll understand what I just wrote,
>I can't help it - its structural, even if I'm lying.
>
>>Justin asked you to consider an example of pyramid-building. In an
>>age in which pyramids were actually being built, the ISS was absent
>>even as an idealized counterfactual, since it didn't have social
>>relations of "Freedom, Equality, Property, & Bentham" that would
>>give rise to the ISS as a necessary fiction of political liberalism.
>
>This is incorrect. Any being that communicates anticipates a
>rejoinder. It is a formal pragmatic condition of communication.
Habermas's theory would be much more coherent without the transcendental presuppositions he'd have us accept (which could be made plausible only by defining communication in such a way as to fit his presuppositions -- the problem of circularity here). Since Habermas's politico-philosophical project is a defense of desirable aspects of modernity (esp. the spirit of the Enlightenment) from Adorno, Heidegger, post-modernists, neo-conservatives, etc., it makes sense to analyze an idealized counterfactual that is the ISS as a historical product of modernity, not as a transcendentally derived condition of all communication throughout history. To do so, Habermas would have to move away from Kant and toward Marx.
>>Habermas, unlike you, suggests that his desire for universal
>>participation in reason-giving in the public sphere is tied up with
>>his concern for political legitimacy & stability of constitutional
>>democracy within a given nation (hence the limit on universality),
>>marrying Kant with Rousseau so to speak.
>
>This is what happens when you start with BFN. Habermas doesn't
>mention law until 1973 (not in any sustained way). Here, is probably
>more in debt to Lukacs and the Frankfurt School than anyone else. He
>certainly wasn't thinking of law when he synthesized Chomsky,
>Wittgenstein and Gadamer - although surely he had a direction in
>mind. The exception here is his second book, the one on the Public
>Sphere, which is a study in the formation of a category, and is
>prior to having read the bulk of what constitutes his theory of
>communicate action, certainly 10 years prior to his theory of
>communicative competence. Yes, Habermas is interested in legitimacy,
>but you have to demonstrate that this interest turns into an
>unwanted presupposition in his empirical research. In other words,
>criticize genetic-structuralism before marrying off anyone.
I'm not criticizing his concern for legitimacy altogether. I'm not the one to say that reason-giving in public spheres is no progress over unreflective obedience to feudal customs! I'm saying, first of all, that a more historicized account of communication would help Habermas make his political arguments better.
>>It appears that you are not only making the ISS ahistorical but
>>also depoliticizing Habermas, perhaps against his intentions, since
>>he has been prolific in polemical interventions (against
>>neo-conservatism, against pacifism with regard to Kosovo, etc.) in
>>current affairs.
>
>Whatever. Throughout I've been defending a program that preserves
>the critique of ideology from sliding off into groundlessness (if
>this is ahistorical and depoliticizing, then I suppose these terms
>have been redefined along with virtue, eh?).
You might revisit Justin's essays on the subject, which seek to criticize both relativism & ahistorical universalism. Norms don't have to be constituted in a neo-Kantian fashion.
Yoshie