>``...We coordinate our action with other people. This is irrefutable.
>Human beings have the capacity to learn. This is irrefutable.
>Language is inherent to cognitive development. This is irrefutable.
>Linguistic interaction constitutes the medium of our capacity to
>understanding. This is irrefutable. When we seek to understanding
>something with someone, we presuppose, like it or not, that
>understanding (of some sort) is possible. This is irrefutable...''
>
>Ken MacK
>-------
>
>While much of that might be true, it still doesn't reduce to a
>colloquium of rational discourse as the only medium through which any
>or all or even most of our social understanding, knowledge or
>communication takes place.
No, of course not.
>And I would actually argue that learning, understanding, and
>communication takes place in many other ways that do not explicitly
>depend on language per se, but rather on a large variety of other
>symbolic systems, say mathematics and art, dance or sex for
>examples. In fact for each of the modes of understanding and kinds of
>knowledge that we might identify, there are mediums, all pre-immanently
>social, through which these understandings are both mediated and
>expressed, many of which are fundamentally non-linguistic.
This becomes awkward. Lacan calls all of this 'extra' stuff "the big Other." But we're not talking about Lacan. I'm curious though: what would understanding mean apart from language? One could have great sex, but without the language to express it... then what has one really had? (Lacan teaches that there is no sexual relation, but we're not talking about Lacan). Are you sure that you aren't confusing sensory perception with understanding? For Habermas, understanding isn't something that we do on our own, it is something that we achieve with other people. Understanding requires an other. While, absolutely, our experience, senses, and cognitive capacities are not exhausted by language, language is the medium of understanding in an intersubjective sense.
>I would even like to argue that the foundation of ethics, almost any
>ethics, is not rational discourse at all, but rather found in the
>psycho-motive registers of poetry, drama and stories of a lived life.
You can assert this, it might even be true. You might be able to derive a norm form reruns of Knight Rider. But, can they be considered legitimate apart from meeting with the consent of others? If one disagrees that ethics can or should be justified, then that's one thing, but you sill need to come up with arguments why this is the case... and the conditions for argumentation entail....
>If I had to name a single historical source for an ethics of revolt,
>which is what I understand the ethical foundations of the Left to be,
>I would name Aeschylus, in Prometheus Bound, 430 bce. Aeschylus was
>completely emersed in the blood of war, tyrants, government
>overthrows, sleazy economic manipulations, a contentiously limited
>democracy and then its follies of empire that composed Fifth century
>Athens.
>
>That is to say the ethical foundations of the left are grounded
>materially in political life and culturally configured as a tragic
>mythology of revolt.
It sounds like you want to say that ethics is some sort of 'revolt of nature' (this might be close to Marcuse, no?) - this might be the impulse, the experience of extraordinary injustice and alienation (Habermas does not dispute the affective base of the lifeworld) - but it, in itself, provides nothing more than a feeling, a sense... which can be interpreted, it can be put in the form of an argument, and it can be debated. I recall some time ago a post about rationality in politics, and you mentioned it didn't have much place - one should simply take up instrumental verbal assaults or actions to secure ones goals... but what if 'we win.' Then what? Smite thine enemies? We can't expect rational debate when people are firing bullets at other people. But, for those we are in solidarity with, we extend ourselves in a more amiable way - and work with them, through processes of understanding... perhaps even informal rules of conduct....
I've noticed that people who take up the same attitude toward their fellow protestors that they do toward whatever they are protesting... usually get side-lined - for the protection of the group. There is good reason for this, when people are impossible to work with they are unpredictable. Sure, that can be a good thing - but not always, if a group wants to be successful then open communication rather than hostility and hot blood carries further. As far as I can tell, anarchist affinity groups work on a communicative model - ground in consensus-building, based on the best arguments regarding how strategic actions are best carried out...
>In any case, the failure to recognize the extremely limited range of
>rational and discursive processes in both their development of and
>practices in social organization, blinds recognition to much more
>dominant and compelling processes and practices that constitute and
>configure the world.
Of course. Habermas is outlining potential. We have the potential for rationalizing our relations with others. No, this shouldn't blind us to the objective conditions of what is and what is not possible. Nevertheless, we need to work with others, and this is communicative action, and precisely what Habermas is trying to explain. After all, we do require an explanation for communicative interactions, right? Better to think about it than pretend they don't exist.
>War and Capital for example. That these can be
>reduced to some formal language, doesn't mean that they arise from
>language---or, just because we can effect their reduction into
>rational discursive forms doesn't mean they exist and function solely
>as rational discursive form. So, then the logical necessity of
>following the conclusion of a well crafted argument is not at all the
>equivalent to the driven necessity of material means that move people
>to action. And, among those means, language, particularly formal
>discourse is perhaps the least effective of all, while we find that
>its own linguistic antithesis, impassioned and ennobling rhetoric,
>poetry, and the forceful persuasion of drama among the more effective
>means. That is to say propaganda, with all its lies, conceits,
>half-truths, low and dirty tricks of the mind and sensibility, melding
>illusion and reality together as art, works.
War and capital - "money and power" - these are to two things that Habermas wrote a book about, 800 pages of book - he identifies both as colonizing the lifeworld, of shrinking the sphere of communicative action and decimating the reality of and potential for rational relations. He notes that if these things are to exist at all, they out to be steering mechanisms of communicative power, the 'legitimate' collective will formation of the public sphere... as infallible, problematic, frustrated and distorted that it might be.
>The distinction between a logical necessity and an ethical one, is
>argued in the play Prometheus Bound, when Hermes tries to convince
>Prometheus that his revolt is logically futile and self
>destructive. Prometheus tells Hermes to stuff it. He knows that Hermes
>is merely Zeus's lackey and is completely without honor, that is
>without an ethics of truth. In other words, Hermes is untrue to his
>own declared intentions. (Note Ken's signature, hmm.)
The only thing that is futile for Habermas is opting out of communicative relations with others. And this is, perhaps, where your 'ethics of tragedy' might be important. When we are *forced* out of communicative relations, when our communicative links are shattered, when we are reduced to silence against our will, when our localities are destroyed, communities torn apart, when we are segregated, when our environment is clear cut...
The categorical imperative of communicative action is that this is something that should never happen. And it happens all the time. Workers are fired without resources for compensation or refute. A woman is beaten in the 'privacy' of her household, people are imprisoned... Perhaps there shouldn't be corporations, perhaps there shouldn't be 'families' ... or 'prisons' - but these are matters that must be decided through collective will formation - and debate.
>To the argument that all symbolic and representation systems have a
>grammar and can be considered language, doesn't persuade either. This
>equivalence between systems depends on deducing an abstract rational
>schema or structured table of relations then calling such forms
>grammars, but from among diverse systems that are constructed on
>entirely different ordering relations than grammars. If these
>relational components were all grammars, then their systems of
>elements would all be languages, but in concrete fact they are not
>language. To speak as if they were, is to presume that a mere
>figurative analogy carries the same logical necessity as does an
>isomorphism.
Well, I don't know. Habermas says that dreams don't have a grammar. But Rainer Nagele points out that just don't have the same kind of grammar as Habermas identifies in language; they have an image-grammar. Maybe you are correct. Maybe the idea of grammar to begin with is an abstract fallacy. I don't know. Habermas maintains that the reconstruction of any rule system - essentially the grammar of and existing social system - must remain hypothetical, awaiting more and more confirmation. Habermas's thesis isn't altogether implausible...
>This grand isomorphism is the ultimate fantasy of discursive
>rationalism, which is to say that all social thought and action can be
>reduced to reason, so reason presupposes its own conclusive hegemony
>in advance. That we can use a linguistic means to understand a
>non-linguistic system doesn't persuade either, since this merges all
>categories of understanding into one, ignoring their fundamental
>differences, and does so in advance of its own understanding. It is
>this form of a priori reduction that lays at the foundation of reason
>and betrays its own arrogance of power.
This is, I admit, the weakest part of Habermas's program. It isn't a 'knock-down' argument though. After all, if we want to understand one another, we still need to communicative. Habermas wants to avoid naturalism, mysticism, theology and those kind of bases for ethics. He would attach emotivism, subjectivism, objectivism, and intuitionism as well... I don't really have a problem with this, even if Habermas's arguments aren't solid.
>In a mythic realm, one can say that reason is to human understanding
>what empire is to the world, a tyranny that has no limit. That the
>great ages of reason arise with great empires and their conquests can
>not be a mere coincidence of history. Ultimately these periods
>perforce the ideal conditions of freedom to mean absolute equivalence
>between identities, which is simply another way of saying: comply,
>resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
Which is why Habermas articulates a theory of the transition from the mythic to the modern. He outlines how it is possible, and goes through the dynamics of the linguistification of the sacred. Again, his thesis isn't implausible. Kell can probably say more about Habermas's reading of Durkheim (and Weber).
To step down a bit... Habermas is ambivalent. At times he's a fierce critic and equally fierce defending. Other times he's a meandering philosopher, trying to think about how things could be different. Maybe this is all just a translation problem, I don't think so. Habermas is at his best when he's the meandering philosopher, when he's interested in asking questions and posing problems. Sometimes he argues that modernity is a sure thing, other times he's not quite as sure.
After much reading, thought and reflection... I have come to a tentative conclusion... that there is an almost imperceptible gap between Habermas's theory of communicative action and his discourse theory of morality. He shifts from an ambivalent and tentative analysis to a strong universal claim. I think he does so by skipping something... I haven't figured what he's skipped yet, not in concrete terms. But there is a problem with the way in which he does this.. it is almost as though one doesn't follow from the other... I can't say much more about it, but it occurred to me a few days ago after spending way too much time reading his work. Maybe it is just the sensation of moving from provocation to defense... don't know.
ken