Habermas is steering between two poles: objectivism and
> subjectivism. For him, subjectivism, as relativism, is
epistemologically
> incoherent, because it demands that the subject know,
transcendentally,
> what the other subject is thinking in order to know that it is
'absolutely'
> different (his take on this is no different than Adorno's). Likewise
for
> objectivism, which eclipses the subject altogether, thus fusing
objectivist
> and subjectivist logic (this is also the argument of Horkheimer and
Adorno
> in DofE).
======
If it eclipses, how can they fuse? Language is headin' for a holiday
here Ken. Nobody's 'solved' the 'problem' of other minds in 3,000
years of philosophy. There may be constraints in our syntax' and
semantics that precludes our ever being satisfied with any number of
approaches to the / of the subject/object relative/absolute
organism/environment.
"...[A]ll scientific knowledge is deferred error. And yet it is more than that. What is it then? What is it we search for in knowledge? Must we say that, like every desire, this one too, is condemned to be perpetually deceived about it's object, to be ignorant of it and thus to miss it? Must this love suffer the same fate as the other one, of watching helplessly as it's acquisitions trickle away between one's fingers? But how can we think that the object of such eminently rational activity is essentially imaginary? If it were, would we not be trapped irredeemebly in a vicious circle? How could we ever release its hold on us except by means of that same rational activity, which, on this very hypothesis, it would continue to overdetermine? If the idea that knowledge can appropriate nature [or society IM] is itself a phantasy, then so too must be the idea that knowledge can appropriate knowledge. It is only in another dream, that of an absolute subject and a pure reflexivity, that one could escape this circle; and this dream--incoherent of course for daylight logic, and governed, as we should expect, only by the logic of desire--is the common, and unconscious dream of both absolute spiritualism and totalitarian scientism." [Cornelius Castoriadus 'Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation' in "Crossroads in the Labyrinth" page 146-147]
Madyamika.....
Ian