Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
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> Ok, Habermas departs historical materialism because he thinks that a model
> of social evolution is better. In other words, he charts out the stage of
> cognitive development, on a psychological and sociological level:
> explaining how a mythological worldview comes to be transformed into a
> modern worldview.
I can't, or at least in the available time won't, follow all of this discussion, but certain fragments of it keep catching my attention. This sounds to me as though Habermas believes one can write a history of ideas -- that by analyzing Set 1 of ideas (worldview, etc) and Set 2, one can discover an explanation of Set 2. Or to put it a bit more bluntly, he assumes that ideas have a history _as ideas_. To put it equally bluntly, this seems to me arrant nonsense. Ideas do not have a history of their own. This may be related to the dispute over whether arguments count: if you assume that ideas have a history, then you must be interested in how one idea or set of ideas gets, by discussing ideas, to change. (Wording wrong here.) I would maintain we _never_ change our ideas _except_ when we find ourselves in a material (social) context which we cannot explain by our given set of ideas. Then we are apt to respond to any idea that explains or seems to explain the new conditions. Or to put it another way, we probably only change our ideas (are influenced by argument) when we are already because of material (social) relations dissatisfied with our current views, find them inadequate to our condition, and go actively looking for new ideas.
Probably a strong element of contingency enters here, determining which alternative ideas we come upon first as it were in our search for an explanation. That would, for example, contribute to explaining the attraction of "kook science" to those who are attracted to it -- the archetypal (for me) example of this being those who think that they must find an evolutionary explanation for January-May marriages. If this perspective is at all correct, we would look for an explanation of Habermas not in the intellectual influences on him but in his social relations, roughly the position of someone who finds it necessary (the struggles in which he was involved having failed) to look for new explanations from a perspective outside those struggles (i.e. from the viewpoint of an academic researcher). This could, I suppose, generate what seems to me an utterly bizarre obsession with "foundations."
The "rhetorical theory" of the Second International (as passed on by Lenin in WITBD) seems to me an entirely adequate explanation of change of ideas. Agitation, in that theory, assumes no prior agreement but only a shared material condition: e.g., a factory exposure tells the workers there only what they already know, but did not explicitly know that others shared that knowledge. I guess I'll stop here.
Carrol
Carrol