Ethical foundations of the left

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Jul 31 16:24:10 PDT 2001


Ian Murray wrote:


> Ken:
> > And Habermas would agree, 100% - and he would add that these things
> > have been institutionalized according to the dictates of instrumental
> > reason, which is contrary to the potential of our human capacity to
> > adopt a communicative perspective - which is what the dominators
> > had to do when they decided to rule the world.

No one ever decided to rule the world. The dominators all simply found themselves alrady caught up in a complex of social relations and adopted the perspectives that made sense of and helped to perpetuate those relations. Some dominators do desert their class, but not because anyone has faced them with superior reasons.
> >
> > The problem is this: if instrumental reason is 'the whole' - then

"Instrumental reason" is an abstraction that does not help understand or perceive anything. I doubt that it exists.

[clip]
> > Habermas escapes this aporia by pointing to a more differentiated
> > understanding of reason, which is completely irreducible to
> > instrumental reason.
> >

I agree that horses are irreducible to centaurs or unicorns. I don't agree that any examinable entity named by "reason" exists. In so far as it is an attribute of human thinking, it must be studied by neuroscience, not sociology, epistemology, or political theory. In so far as it is not an aspect of the human organism, then it is a social relation. This whole discourse journeys further and further from any conceivable historical reality.

[clip]
> > ken
> =======
> Metaphor alert[s]!

This I don't think is fair. There are enough grounds upon which to reject Habermas / Ken / Kelley without invoking a standard (metaphorical vs literal language) which is as non-existent as ISS.

Carrol
>
> Ian



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