CALL FOR PAPERS
BEYOND REIFICATION: CRITICAL THEORY AND THE CHALLENGE OF PRAXIS
John Cabot University
May 21-23, 2008
John Cabot University of Rome is hosting the second international conference on Critical Theory, which will be held at its campus in Rome,Italy - Via della Lungara 233. The conference will examine the importance and the developments of the
Frankfurt School by addressing both the philosophical tradition of the early stages of Critical Theory - and in particular the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse - as well as the application of their theories to our contemporary society. In order to reflect the wide range of topics addressed by Critical Theory, the conference will cover different aspects of philosophical reflection on politics, aesthetics, sociology, technology, literature
and any other relevant field of study. The conference will be held at John Cabot University on May 21-23, 2008. It will begin on Wednesday morning and end by Friday afternoon. During the sessions, each speaker will have one hour, with 30-40 minutes for presentation, followed by 20-30 minutes of discussion. All presentations
will be made in English.
Keynote speakers:
Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University Chicago
Andrew Feenberg, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver
Alessandro Ferrara, University of Rome, Tor Vergata
David Ingram, Loyola University Chicago
Martin Matustik, Purdue University
Hugh Miller, Loyola University Chicago
Stefano Petrucciani, University of Rome, La Sapienza
Francesco Saverio Trincia, University of Rome, La Sapienza
If you are interested in presenting a paper, please submit a 1-2 page abstract by January 15, 2008 (including name, eventual institutional affiliation and mailing address). Abstracts should be submitted by email. Decisions regarding the program will be made by February 2008. Presented papers will be printed in a book dedicated to the conference. To submit an abstract, or for more information, contact:
Stefano Giacchetti - sgiacchetti@johncabot.edu
Tel: (+39) 06-81905467
more here
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Critical theory and the traps of conspiracy thinking
Volker Heins
McGill University, Montreal, Canada Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt, Germany
Historically, blatantly untrue and defamatory conspiracy theories had disastrous consequences for those who were portrayed in them as evil-doers. At the same time, conspiratorial agreements at the expense of the common good between powerful groups in society do exist and have occasionally been uncovered. Against this background, the article describes different ways in which critical theory has looked at conspiracies. First, an attempt is made to show that Max Horkheimer's notes on `rackets' are an ambitious but flawed attempt to theorize conspiracy. It is argued that Horkheimer's theory is imbued by the very conspiracy thinking that he proposed to criticize. Second, the author suggests recovering Franz Neumann's concept of `political alienation' as a more appropriate starting point to think critically about the ethical and epistemological questions raised by conspiracy theories.
Key Words: Theodor Adorno • alienation • conspiracy • critical theory • Max Horkheimer • Franz Neumann • rackets
from here
McGill University, Montreal, Canada Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt, Germany
Historically, blatantly untrue and defamatory conspiracy theories had disastrous consequences for those who were portrayed in them as evil-doers. At the same time, conspiratorial agreements at the expense of the common good between powerful groups in society do exist and have occasionally been uncovered. Against this background, the article describes different ways in which critical theory has looked at conspiracies. First, an attempt is made to show that Max Horkheimer's notes on `rackets' are an ambitious but flawed attempt to theorize conspiracy. It is argued that Horkheimer's theory is imbued by the very conspiracy thinking that he proposed to criticize. Second, the author suggests recovering Franz Neumann's concept of `political alienation' as a more appropriate starting point to think critically about the ethical and epistemological questions raised by conspiracy theories.
Key Words: Theodor Adorno • alienation • conspiracy • critical theory • Max Horkheimer • Franz Neumann • rackets
from here
Sunday, November 4, 2007
". . . And to define America, her athletic democracy."
Dear Mary, dear Friends and Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Given the highly personal occasion that brings us together here today, please allow me to start with a private memory.
I first met Richard Rorty in 1974 at a conference on Heidegger in San Diego. At the beginning of the convention, a video was screened of an interview with the absent Herbert Marcuse, who in it described his relationship to Heidegger in the early 1930s more mildly than the sharp post-War correspondence between the two men would have suggested. Much to my annoyance, this set the tone for the entire conference, where an unpolitical veneration of Heidegger prevailed. Only Marjorie Green, who had likewise studied in Freiburg prior to 1933, passed critical comment, saying that back then at best the closer circle of Heidegger students, and Marcuse belonged to it, could have been deceived as to the real political outlook of their mentor.
In this ambivalent mood I then heard a professor from Princeton, known to me until then only as the editor of a famed collection of essays on the Linguistic Turn, put forward a provocative comparison. He tried to strike harmony between the dissonant voices of three world-famous soloists in the frame of a strange concert: Dewey, the radical democrat and the most political of the pragmatists, performed in this orchestra alongside Heidegger, that embodiment of the arrogant German mandarin par excellence. And the third in this unlikely league was Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations had taught me so much; but he, too, was not completely free of the prejudices of the German ideology, with its fetishization of spirit, and cut a strange figure as a comrade of Dewey. [1]
Certainly, from the perspective of Humboldt and philosophical hermeneutics, a look at the world-disclosing function of language reveals an affinity between Heidegger and Wittgenstein. And that discovery must have fascinated Rorty, given that Thomas Kuhn had convinced him to read the history of science from a contextualist vantage point. But how did Dewey fit in this constellation—the embodiment of that democratic wing of the Young Hegelians that we had so sorely lacked in Europe? After all, Dewey's way of thinking stood in strident contrast to the Greco-German pretension, the high tone and elitist gesture of the Few who claim a privileged access to truth against the many.
At that time, I found the association so obscene that I quite lost my cool in the discussion. Surprisingly, however, the important colleague from Princeton was by no means irritated by the resilient protest from the backwoods of Germany and instead was so kind as to invite me into his seminar. For me, my visit to Princeton marked the beginning of a friendship as happy and rewarding as instructive. On the bedrock of shared political convictions, we were easily able to discuss and endure our philosophical differences. Thus, the kind of "priority of politics over philosophy" that Dick defended as a topic tacitly served as a source of our continuing relation. As regards Heidegger, incidentally, my initial agitation was unfounded. Dick likewise felt a greater affinty to the pragmatic Heidegger of the early parts of Being and Time than to the esoteric thinker who devoutly listened to the voice of Being. [2]
After the first meeting, Dick sent me an offprint of his essay "The World Well Lost"; at the time, the title's ironic allusion could itself have drawn my attention to the intellectual and the writer behind the philosopher Richard Rorty. However, I read the essay, with its stringent analytical argumentation, the way one tends to read articles from the Journal of Philosophy. Only with hindsight did I realize that it was a preliminary piece for that critique of the modern paradigm of epistemology that he was to publish a few years later as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), a book that was to have such an impact. What was revolutionary in the study was less the careful explication and critical reconstruction of the linguistic turn performed in different ways by both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, but more the insistence on one crucial consequence of the shift from "consciousness" to "language." Step by step, Rorty deconstructs the spectator model of "representative" or "fact-copying" thought. And this critique went to the heart of a discipline that since Russell and Carnap was concerned with achieving scientific respectability by a logical and semantic treatment of fundamental epistemological issues first raised in the 17th century.
Allow me to briefly remind you of the key issue here. If facts cannot be construed independently of the propositional structure of our language and if the truth of opinions or statements can only be corrected by other opinions or statements, then any idea of truth as a correspondence between sentences and facts "out there" is misleading. We cannot describe nature in a language we assume to be nature's own language. According to the pragmatist interpretation, the "copying" of reality is replaced by a problem-solving "coping" with the challenges of an overcomplex world. In other words, we acquire our knowledge of facts in the course of a constructive approach to a surprising environment. Nature only provides indirect answers as all its answers refer to the grammar of our questions. What we call the "world" therefore does not consist of the totality of facts. For us, it is the sum total of the cognitively relevant constraints imposed on our attempts to learn from and achieve control over contingent natural processes through reliable predictions.
Rorty's painstaking analysis of the assumed representative function of the knowing mind deserves the respect also of those colleagues who are not willing to follow the ambitious thrust of the author's conclusions. This ambition was revealed back then by the way the English title was expanded on for the German translation: Here, The Mirror of Nature was subtitled A Critique of Philosophy—meaning philosophy as such. I myself first grasped the entire range of Rorty's project, and thus the meaning behind that strange constellation of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey, when I read the introduction to his essay collection Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). If one knew the author in persona, it was not easy to match the extraordinary claims of this philosopher, writer, and political intellectual with the modest, shy, and sensitive habit of the person of the same name. His public appearances were characterized by rhetorical brilliance, controlled passion, the charm of a youthful, at times polemically acute mind, indeed by a certain pathos. Deflation and understatement can have a pathos of their own. But behind the aura of the impressive speaker and writer and the passionate teacher lay concealed that honest and soft, nobly restrained and infinitely loveable man who hated nothing more than any pretense of profundity. Yet, for all our reverence for the character of a friend, we must not fail to mention the pretensions of the philosophical claims he championed.
Richard Rorty had in mind nothing less than to foster a culture that liberated itself from what he saw as the conceptual obsessions of Greek philosophy—and a fetishism of science that sprouted from the furrows of that metaphysics. What he understood "metaphysics" to mean and what he criticized about it can be best seen if we bear in mind what this critique was borne of: "Philosophers became preoccupied with images of the future only after they gave up the hope of gaining knowledge of the eternal." [3] Platonism keeps its gaze fixed on the immutable ideas of the good and the true and spawns a web of categorical distinctions in which the creative energies of a self-generating human species ossify. Rorty does not construe the priority of essence over appearance, of the universal over the particular, of necessity over contingency or of nature over history as a purely theoretical matter. Because this is a matter of structuring ways of life, he seeks to train his contemporaries in a vocabulary that articulates a different view of the world and of ourselves.
A second, radical boost of the Enlightenment, so Rorty's hope, would rejuvenate the authentic motifs of a shattered Modernity. Modernity must scoop all normativity from within itself. There is no longer any authority or foundation beyond the opaque ebb and flow of contingencies. No one is able to exit from her local context without finding herself in a different one. At the same time, the human condition is characterized by the fact that the sober recognition of the finitude and corruptibility of human beings—the recognition of the fallibility of the mind, the vulnerability of the body, and the fragility of social bonds—can and should become the motor driving the creativity of a restless self-transformation of society and culture. Against this backdrop, we must, so Rorty, learn to see ourselves as the sons and daughters of a self-confident Modernity, if in our politically, economically, and socially torn global society Walt Whitman's belief in a better future is to have a chance at all. The democratic voice of hope for a brotherly and inclusive form of social life must not fall silent.
The moving songs of the public intellectual Richard Rorty—his interviews and lectures, his exoteric doctrines of "contingency, irony, and solidarity," the treatises that were disseminated worldwide—they are all infused with the peculiarly romantic and very personal triple voice of meta-philosophy, neo-pragmatism, and leftist patriotism. For this life and work, I can think of no more fitting an epitaph than an inscription by Walt Whitman dating from 1871. Under the heading of To Foreign Lands, these are words that Dick might have also directed to his European friends:
I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle
in the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them
what you wanted.
Notes
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).
2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 190f.
3. Richard Rorty, "Philosophy and the Future," in Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., ed., Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), p. 199.
--
Ladies and Gentlemen, for this hour you invited a philosophical colleague to speak and can thus expect that I will attempt to explain how Richard Rorty proceeded from that "metacritique of knowledge" [4] that I drew to your attention, to a critique of metaphysics, and from there to the cosmopolitan patriotism of a very American democrat.
The pragmatist conception of knowledge that Rorty develops in The Mirror of Nature should be seen in the context of a Hegelian naturalism. In this view, the basic conditions for a culture created by man are the result of natural evolution. All cultural achievements in the past can be construed functionally as "tools" that have proved their worth in practical as well as instrumental interaction with risky environments. This way of looking at anthropology and history leads only to a "soft" naturalism, as the Darwinist language does not undermine the everyday self-understanding of socialized individuals as autonomous, creative, and learning actors. By contrast, the line between soft and hard naturalism is crossed by those reductionist explanations that in a speculative manner combine insights from biogenetics and neurology in the framework of a neo-Darwinist theory of evolution. They cross the boundary of a naturalist self-objectification of man, beyond which we can no longer grasp ourselves as the authors of our actions, discoveries, and inventions. Under the sway of such objectivistic self-descriptions, if they purport to be the only true ones, it is the awareness of a "self" that disappears. They treat exactly that as an illusion which neopragmatism—a kind of Lebensphilosophie—so celebrates in man, namely, the consciousness of freedom, creativity, and learning.
Rorty quite simply had to protest this move toward scientism. Because he fully elaborates his own concept of man in a Darwinist language, he had now to introduce a stop rule into this kind of soft naturalism. In order to be able to reject the hard naturalism of a Daniel Dennett as "scientism," he has to offer an explanation of the uncautious inflation of objectifying research approaches to the status of a pseudo-scientific objectivism. He hoped to find such an explanation by embedding the spectator model of knowledge in a sweeping deconstruction of the history of metaphysics. In this broader context he established scientism's affinity to Platonism. Both share the bad habit of conceiving of human knowledge as a vision from nowhere, thus moving all of our constructive research practices beyond the limits of our or of any world: "The last line of defense for essentialist philosophers is the belief that physical science gets us outside ourselves, outside our language and our purposes to something splendidly nonhuman and nonrelational." [5] With the help of Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's critique of the ontological implications of the language of physicalism, Rorty claims to uncover even in the reductionist strategies of cognitive scientists and biologists the Platonic heritage of the assumption of world-less objectivity that supposedly allows for a view from nowhere.
Rorty's critique of metaphysics pays the price of an anti-realism that Dewey had not paid in his key anti-Platonist text, The Reconstruction in Philosophy. Rorty felt he had to combine soft naturalism with radical historicism if he wanted to keep it from sliding into scientism. He felt that a modern culture, exclusively standing on feet of its own, would only avoid an appealing scientistic self-reification if it foregoes both traps: first, the assumption of an objective world that exists independently of our descriptions and, secondly, the innerworldly transcendence of universalist claims to validity. Also our standards of rationality to which we performatively lay claim bow down to the ups and downs of cultural practices.
Rorty may have found it easy to take this rather controversial step, because he obviously found Heidegger's deconstruction appealing for another reason, too. There is a streak of nostalgia about claiming to offer a philosophy that cleans up with all extant philosophy, a sentiment resulting from deep disappointment with metaphysic's unredeemed promises. The melancholy in this gesture of breaking away and surpassing reveals a Platonist motivation behind Rorty's anti-Platonism, as in Heidegger's. Rorty bemoans the state of a discipline that retains the name philosophy but has forfeited any public relevance. In particular, the analytical orthodoxy whence Rorty himself originated has eased an accelerated philosophy's transformation into a highly specialized and departmentalized discipline. Here, only those questions are considered serious as are raised by the profession, and not longer by "life." Rorty was troubled by this development as early as 1967, and it pained him. At that time, his doubts in the state of the art led him to taunt the profession by denying even the basic presupposition of our business "that there are philosophical truths to be discovered and demonstrated by argument." [6] A quite different perspective arises from the question as to what can or should remain of philosophy after the end of metaphysics.
In Rorty's view, the critique of Platonism can give rise only to a philosophy that has an historical consciousness of itself and captures its own time in thought, in other words, that continues the discourse of Modernity once initiated by Hegel. At this point, the paths of Heidegger and Rorty part, however. Rorty was never tempted to pursue the arrogant self-celebration of a train of thought that felt it could dispense with all argumentation. Like Dewey, he conducted two discourses simultaneously, one with his fellow philosophers on technical questions, and the other with the general public on issues relating to how Modernity understands itself. He conducted this exoteric discourse in Wittgenstein's therapeutic vein. Once the human mind becomes ensnared in the conceptual network of Platonism, it is not theory that helps to cure this diseasing self-misunderstanding, but only the deflation of unnecessary theoretical claims. This accounts for a typical trait in Rorty's public appearances, his rhetoric of debunking, of forget it, of shrugging off or filing away, his recommendation that an issue be "dropped" because it "has become uninteresting."
The anti-Platonist thrust is directed against a grand self-image that because of an imagined participation in the ideal, i.e., supra-human world in fact degrades us to being slaves of these idols. Rorty fought against the Platonist compulsion to deceive ourselves about the merely conventional and contingent aspects of daily life; in this respect, he always shared the pragmatists' attitudes. Wittgenstein's style of therapy had to step back behind Dewey's democratic commitment, because Rorty's therapeutic practice is meant to have a transforming and liberating effect and not the quietist and thus conservative sense of restoring an undistorted status quo ante. The double front line taken against metaphysics and scientism follows objectives for which Rorty coins effective slogans. He defends the "priority of democracy over philosophy" and the "priority of technology over theory." Philosophy and the sciences must make themselves useful, now that their success can no longer be measured in terms of whether statements correspond with a reality untouched by language and culture.
What counts is the contribution that philosophical and scientific practice can make as well to an ever more expanding consensus on shared interests and an improved mutual understanding on competing human needs as to the development of the means to satisfy them. Just as theory formation in the natural sciences serves its possible technical success, so philosophy serves democracy and freedom: "if we take care of political freedom, we get truth as a bonus." Be that as it may, philosophy can play a public role if it reflects sensitively on the pressing problems of the day and offers a diagnosis of his time. In this country, Richard Rorty like almost no other did indeed restore philosophy's public importance. It is a moot point whether his colleagues will thank him for that.
However, a philosopher who dons the role of a public intellectual can have recourse neither to the expert knowledge of the natural and social sciences nor even to the historical and aesthetic knowledge accumulated by the humanities. In his public interventions, Rorty makes a virtue of these shortcomings by turning the task of philosophy itself into a topic. He opts for metaphilosophical considerations, confronts the "scientific" philosophers with those who take their cue from literature. Like Nietzsche, he ponders the benefits and disadvantages of classical education, if in his own way: "All of these wonderful books are only rungs on a ladder that, with a bit of luck, one day we may be able to do without. If we stopped reading canonical philosophy books, we would be less aware of the forces that make us think and talk as we do. We would be less aware to grasp our contingency, less capable of being 'ironists'." [7]
So that is the one task of philosophy: to exercise its addresses in an awareness of the contingencies of life on earth, in particular the contingencies that impact on the presumed foundations, on what we take to be our "final" vocabularies. In this way, Rorty practiced something of what the ancients called "wisdom." And he used a word for this practice that is not by chance of religious origin, namely "edification." Private edification is of course only half of the business of philosophical communication. Public commitment is the other, even more important task of philosophy. As a pragmatist, Rorty can prompt citizens and elites in the world's leading power to remember their own tradition. He recommends this cultural resource as the key to interpreting the current situation.
Pragmatism is expressed by the spirit of great writers and great philosophers alike—Rorty repeatedly cites Emerson and Whitman, James and Dewey. And because this spirit is aware of its American origins, and also sees itself as a driving force of progressivism, all the pragmatist writers and philosophers more or less shared the profile of a leftist patriotism, that is one associated with cosmopolitanism. Rorty has the fortunate combination of his three rare talents to thank for the fact that he could draw on this heritage undividedly, for he was equally an important philosopher, a marvelous writer, and a successful political intellectual.
Notes
4. Thus, the title of Theodor W. Adorno's materialist critique of Husserl's epistemology.
5. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 59.
6. Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 36.
7. Eduardo Mendieta, ed., Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 79.
=
Let me conclude our commemoration of Richard Rorty with one word each on the roles he so gloriously mastered, that of the philosopher, the writer, and the left cosmopolitan patriot.
First, the philosopher. In his profession, Richard Rorty exchanged the most sophisticated arguments with the most prominent of his colleagues. He debated the concept of truth with Donald Davidson, he argued about realism and rationality with Hilary Putnam, about the concept of the mental with Daniel Dennet, on intersubjectivity and objectivity with John McDowell, and with his master student Robert Brandom on the status of facts. [8] On the European continent, his work is as strongly in evidence as it is in the English-speaking world, if not possibly more influential than it is here. Rorty mastered the philosophical idioms of both worlds. Two of his three philosophical heroes were, after all, Europeans. With his interpretive skills he did great service for Foucault and Derrida, not only in the United States, but also in Germany. And it was also he via whom we in Europe indirectly communicated with one another when we found it hard to reach an understanding between the parties to the East and West of the river Rhine.
As to the writer, we have to acknowledge the fact that among those rare philosophers who can write flawless scholarly prose, Richard Rorty came closest to the spirit of poetry. His strategy of an eye-opening renovation of philosophical jargon laid the foundations for the affinity between what he achieved with his texts and the world-disclosing power of literature. Down through the decades, no other colleague surprised me with new ideas and exciting formulations the way he did. Rorty overwhelms his readers with mind-boggling rearrangements of conceptual constellations, he shocks them with thrilling binary oppositions. He often transforms complex chains of thoughts into seemingly barbaric simplifications, but at second glance such dense formulas prove to contain innovative interpretations. Rorty plays with his readers' conventional expectations. With unusual series of names, he asks them to rethink connections. Sometimes it is only a matter of emphasis. If he names Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Annette Baier, and Robert Brandom in a single breath, then the subliminal discrepancy that disconcerts the reader is the real message—in this case, the reference to Annette Baier's great reconstruction of Hume's moral philosophy, which Rorty wishes to emphasize as an "intellectual advance."
Finally, in Rorty we encounter an old-fashioned sort of leftist intellectual who believes in education and social reform. What he finds most important about a democratic constitution is that it provides the oppressed and encumbered with instruments with which they "can defend themselves against the wealthy and the powerful." The focus is on abolishing institutions that continue exploitation and degradation. And it is on promoting a tolerant society that keeps people together in solidarity despite growing diversity and recognizes no authority as binding that cannot be derived from deliberation and revisable agreements of all involved. Rorty terms himself a red diaper-anticommunist baby and a teenage Cold War liberal. But that past did not leave the slightest trace of resentment in him. He was completely free of the scars so typical of former radicals as well as of many of the older and some of the younger liberal hawks. If he gave a somewhat trenchant political response, then it was the one he directed against a cultural Left which he felt had bid farewell to the efforts of the arena: "Insofar as a Left becomes spectatorial and retrospective, it ceases to be a Left."
With Achieving our Country, his most personal and moving book, Richard Rorty pinned his colors to the mast of an American patriotism that the world need not fear. In the melody of this text we find a combination of the exceptional status of the world's oldest democracy—one that can be proud of the normative substance of its principles—and the sensitivity for the new and now global diversity of cultural perspectives and voices. What is new about this global pluralism compared with the charged pluralism of a national society is the fact that within the inclusive frame of an encompassing international community, the dangers of disintegration can no longer be diverted smartly onto some enemy on the outside. Today, evolutionary anthropology with its comparative research into children and chimpanzees of the same age catches up with an old pragmatist insight when it rediscovers a "perspective-taking" ability to be something on which we humans have a monopoly. Bertolt Brecht suggested reciprocal perspective-taking is the essential condition of true patriotism:
And because we improve this country,
We love it and shield it.
And it may appear most dearest to us
As other people's find their own.
Dick knew those lines from the famous children's hymn and knew that even for a super-power cosmopolitanism is not the same thing as the global export of its own way of life. He knew that a democracy only preserves its robust and "athletic" character by self-criticism. In an interview conducted on September 11, 2001, he warned against Bush's "arrogant anti-internationalism." He reminded us instead of the very idea that had, in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War, prompted an American president to envisage a new design for a future world order and to push the establishment of the United Nations. Yet, Rorty was not unrealistic in how he saw things: "That scenario now sounds less plausible. But it is the only one I can envisage that might actually have good results." And he then added a sentence that expresses the spirit of this person and also the spirit of the best tradition this country has brought forth: "There is, to be sure, plenty of reason for pessimism, but it would be better to do what one can to get people to follow an improbable scenario than to simply throw up one's hands." [9]
That spirit is to be found throughout Richard Rorty's oeuvre and will continue to live with and through it.
Click here for part 1 of this address, and here for part 2.
Notes
8. Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and his Critics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
9. Mendieta, ed., Take Care of Freedom, p. 101.
from here
Given the highly personal occasion that brings us together here today, please allow me to start with a private memory.
I first met Richard Rorty in 1974 at a conference on Heidegger in San Diego. At the beginning of the convention, a video was screened of an interview with the absent Herbert Marcuse, who in it described his relationship to Heidegger in the early 1930s more mildly than the sharp post-War correspondence between the two men would have suggested. Much to my annoyance, this set the tone for the entire conference, where an unpolitical veneration of Heidegger prevailed. Only Marjorie Green, who had likewise studied in Freiburg prior to 1933, passed critical comment, saying that back then at best the closer circle of Heidegger students, and Marcuse belonged to it, could have been deceived as to the real political outlook of their mentor.
In this ambivalent mood I then heard a professor from Princeton, known to me until then only as the editor of a famed collection of essays on the Linguistic Turn, put forward a provocative comparison. He tried to strike harmony between the dissonant voices of three world-famous soloists in the frame of a strange concert: Dewey, the radical democrat and the most political of the pragmatists, performed in this orchestra alongside Heidegger, that embodiment of the arrogant German mandarin par excellence. And the third in this unlikely league was Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations had taught me so much; but he, too, was not completely free of the prejudices of the German ideology, with its fetishization of spirit, and cut a strange figure as a comrade of Dewey. [1]
Certainly, from the perspective of Humboldt and philosophical hermeneutics, a look at the world-disclosing function of language reveals an affinity between Heidegger and Wittgenstein. And that discovery must have fascinated Rorty, given that Thomas Kuhn had convinced him to read the history of science from a contextualist vantage point. But how did Dewey fit in this constellation—the embodiment of that democratic wing of the Young Hegelians that we had so sorely lacked in Europe? After all, Dewey's way of thinking stood in strident contrast to the Greco-German pretension, the high tone and elitist gesture of the Few who claim a privileged access to truth against the many.
At that time, I found the association so obscene that I quite lost my cool in the discussion. Surprisingly, however, the important colleague from Princeton was by no means irritated by the resilient protest from the backwoods of Germany and instead was so kind as to invite me into his seminar. For me, my visit to Princeton marked the beginning of a friendship as happy and rewarding as instructive. On the bedrock of shared political convictions, we were easily able to discuss and endure our philosophical differences. Thus, the kind of "priority of politics over philosophy" that Dick defended as a topic tacitly served as a source of our continuing relation. As regards Heidegger, incidentally, my initial agitation was unfounded. Dick likewise felt a greater affinty to the pragmatic Heidegger of the early parts of Being and Time than to the esoteric thinker who devoutly listened to the voice of Being. [2]
After the first meeting, Dick sent me an offprint of his essay "The World Well Lost"; at the time, the title's ironic allusion could itself have drawn my attention to the intellectual and the writer behind the philosopher Richard Rorty. However, I read the essay, with its stringent analytical argumentation, the way one tends to read articles from the Journal of Philosophy. Only with hindsight did I realize that it was a preliminary piece for that critique of the modern paradigm of epistemology that he was to publish a few years later as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), a book that was to have such an impact. What was revolutionary in the study was less the careful explication and critical reconstruction of the linguistic turn performed in different ways by both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, but more the insistence on one crucial consequence of the shift from "consciousness" to "language." Step by step, Rorty deconstructs the spectator model of "representative" or "fact-copying" thought. And this critique went to the heart of a discipline that since Russell and Carnap was concerned with achieving scientific respectability by a logical and semantic treatment of fundamental epistemological issues first raised in the 17th century.
Allow me to briefly remind you of the key issue here. If facts cannot be construed independently of the propositional structure of our language and if the truth of opinions or statements can only be corrected by other opinions or statements, then any idea of truth as a correspondence between sentences and facts "out there" is misleading. We cannot describe nature in a language we assume to be nature's own language. According to the pragmatist interpretation, the "copying" of reality is replaced by a problem-solving "coping" with the challenges of an overcomplex world. In other words, we acquire our knowledge of facts in the course of a constructive approach to a surprising environment. Nature only provides indirect answers as all its answers refer to the grammar of our questions. What we call the "world" therefore does not consist of the totality of facts. For us, it is the sum total of the cognitively relevant constraints imposed on our attempts to learn from and achieve control over contingent natural processes through reliable predictions.
Rorty's painstaking analysis of the assumed representative function of the knowing mind deserves the respect also of those colleagues who are not willing to follow the ambitious thrust of the author's conclusions. This ambition was revealed back then by the way the English title was expanded on for the German translation: Here, The Mirror of Nature was subtitled A Critique of Philosophy—meaning philosophy as such. I myself first grasped the entire range of Rorty's project, and thus the meaning behind that strange constellation of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey, when I read the introduction to his essay collection Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). If one knew the author in persona, it was not easy to match the extraordinary claims of this philosopher, writer, and political intellectual with the modest, shy, and sensitive habit of the person of the same name. His public appearances were characterized by rhetorical brilliance, controlled passion, the charm of a youthful, at times polemically acute mind, indeed by a certain pathos. Deflation and understatement can have a pathos of their own. But behind the aura of the impressive speaker and writer and the passionate teacher lay concealed that honest and soft, nobly restrained and infinitely loveable man who hated nothing more than any pretense of profundity. Yet, for all our reverence for the character of a friend, we must not fail to mention the pretensions of the philosophical claims he championed.
Richard Rorty had in mind nothing less than to foster a culture that liberated itself from what he saw as the conceptual obsessions of Greek philosophy—and a fetishism of science that sprouted from the furrows of that metaphysics. What he understood "metaphysics" to mean and what he criticized about it can be best seen if we bear in mind what this critique was borne of: "Philosophers became preoccupied with images of the future only after they gave up the hope of gaining knowledge of the eternal." [3] Platonism keeps its gaze fixed on the immutable ideas of the good and the true and spawns a web of categorical distinctions in which the creative energies of a self-generating human species ossify. Rorty does not construe the priority of essence over appearance, of the universal over the particular, of necessity over contingency or of nature over history as a purely theoretical matter. Because this is a matter of structuring ways of life, he seeks to train his contemporaries in a vocabulary that articulates a different view of the world and of ourselves.
A second, radical boost of the Enlightenment, so Rorty's hope, would rejuvenate the authentic motifs of a shattered Modernity. Modernity must scoop all normativity from within itself. There is no longer any authority or foundation beyond the opaque ebb and flow of contingencies. No one is able to exit from her local context without finding herself in a different one. At the same time, the human condition is characterized by the fact that the sober recognition of the finitude and corruptibility of human beings—the recognition of the fallibility of the mind, the vulnerability of the body, and the fragility of social bonds—can and should become the motor driving the creativity of a restless self-transformation of society and culture. Against this backdrop, we must, so Rorty, learn to see ourselves as the sons and daughters of a self-confident Modernity, if in our politically, economically, and socially torn global society Walt Whitman's belief in a better future is to have a chance at all. The democratic voice of hope for a brotherly and inclusive form of social life must not fall silent.
The moving songs of the public intellectual Richard Rorty—his interviews and lectures, his exoteric doctrines of "contingency, irony, and solidarity," the treatises that were disseminated worldwide—they are all infused with the peculiarly romantic and very personal triple voice of meta-philosophy, neo-pragmatism, and leftist patriotism. For this life and work, I can think of no more fitting an epitaph than an inscription by Walt Whitman dating from 1871. Under the heading of To Foreign Lands, these are words that Dick might have also directed to his European friends:
I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle
in the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them
what you wanted.
Notes
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).
2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 190f.
3. Richard Rorty, "Philosophy and the Future," in Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., ed., Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), p. 199.
--
Ladies and Gentlemen, for this hour you invited a philosophical colleague to speak and can thus expect that I will attempt to explain how Richard Rorty proceeded from that "metacritique of knowledge" [4] that I drew to your attention, to a critique of metaphysics, and from there to the cosmopolitan patriotism of a very American democrat.
The pragmatist conception of knowledge that Rorty develops in The Mirror of Nature should be seen in the context of a Hegelian naturalism. In this view, the basic conditions for a culture created by man are the result of natural evolution. All cultural achievements in the past can be construed functionally as "tools" that have proved their worth in practical as well as instrumental interaction with risky environments. This way of looking at anthropology and history leads only to a "soft" naturalism, as the Darwinist language does not undermine the everyday self-understanding of socialized individuals as autonomous, creative, and learning actors. By contrast, the line between soft and hard naturalism is crossed by those reductionist explanations that in a speculative manner combine insights from biogenetics and neurology in the framework of a neo-Darwinist theory of evolution. They cross the boundary of a naturalist self-objectification of man, beyond which we can no longer grasp ourselves as the authors of our actions, discoveries, and inventions. Under the sway of such objectivistic self-descriptions, if they purport to be the only true ones, it is the awareness of a "self" that disappears. They treat exactly that as an illusion which neopragmatism—a kind of Lebensphilosophie—so celebrates in man, namely, the consciousness of freedom, creativity, and learning.
Rorty quite simply had to protest this move toward scientism. Because he fully elaborates his own concept of man in a Darwinist language, he had now to introduce a stop rule into this kind of soft naturalism. In order to be able to reject the hard naturalism of a Daniel Dennett as "scientism," he has to offer an explanation of the uncautious inflation of objectifying research approaches to the status of a pseudo-scientific objectivism. He hoped to find such an explanation by embedding the spectator model of knowledge in a sweeping deconstruction of the history of metaphysics. In this broader context he established scientism's affinity to Platonism. Both share the bad habit of conceiving of human knowledge as a vision from nowhere, thus moving all of our constructive research practices beyond the limits of our or of any world: "The last line of defense for essentialist philosophers is the belief that physical science gets us outside ourselves, outside our language and our purposes to something splendidly nonhuman and nonrelational." [5] With the help of Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's critique of the ontological implications of the language of physicalism, Rorty claims to uncover even in the reductionist strategies of cognitive scientists and biologists the Platonic heritage of the assumption of world-less objectivity that supposedly allows for a view from nowhere.
Rorty's critique of metaphysics pays the price of an anti-realism that Dewey had not paid in his key anti-Platonist text, The Reconstruction in Philosophy. Rorty felt he had to combine soft naturalism with radical historicism if he wanted to keep it from sliding into scientism. He felt that a modern culture, exclusively standing on feet of its own, would only avoid an appealing scientistic self-reification if it foregoes both traps: first, the assumption of an objective world that exists independently of our descriptions and, secondly, the innerworldly transcendence of universalist claims to validity. Also our standards of rationality to which we performatively lay claim bow down to the ups and downs of cultural practices.
Rorty may have found it easy to take this rather controversial step, because he obviously found Heidegger's deconstruction appealing for another reason, too. There is a streak of nostalgia about claiming to offer a philosophy that cleans up with all extant philosophy, a sentiment resulting from deep disappointment with metaphysic's unredeemed promises. The melancholy in this gesture of breaking away and surpassing reveals a Platonist motivation behind Rorty's anti-Platonism, as in Heidegger's. Rorty bemoans the state of a discipline that retains the name philosophy but has forfeited any public relevance. In particular, the analytical orthodoxy whence Rorty himself originated has eased an accelerated philosophy's transformation into a highly specialized and departmentalized discipline. Here, only those questions are considered serious as are raised by the profession, and not longer by "life." Rorty was troubled by this development as early as 1967, and it pained him. At that time, his doubts in the state of the art led him to taunt the profession by denying even the basic presupposition of our business "that there are philosophical truths to be discovered and demonstrated by argument." [6] A quite different perspective arises from the question as to what can or should remain of philosophy after the end of metaphysics.
In Rorty's view, the critique of Platonism can give rise only to a philosophy that has an historical consciousness of itself and captures its own time in thought, in other words, that continues the discourse of Modernity once initiated by Hegel. At this point, the paths of Heidegger and Rorty part, however. Rorty was never tempted to pursue the arrogant self-celebration of a train of thought that felt it could dispense with all argumentation. Like Dewey, he conducted two discourses simultaneously, one with his fellow philosophers on technical questions, and the other with the general public on issues relating to how Modernity understands itself. He conducted this exoteric discourse in Wittgenstein's therapeutic vein. Once the human mind becomes ensnared in the conceptual network of Platonism, it is not theory that helps to cure this diseasing self-misunderstanding, but only the deflation of unnecessary theoretical claims. This accounts for a typical trait in Rorty's public appearances, his rhetoric of debunking, of forget it, of shrugging off or filing away, his recommendation that an issue be "dropped" because it "has become uninteresting."
The anti-Platonist thrust is directed against a grand self-image that because of an imagined participation in the ideal, i.e., supra-human world in fact degrades us to being slaves of these idols. Rorty fought against the Platonist compulsion to deceive ourselves about the merely conventional and contingent aspects of daily life; in this respect, he always shared the pragmatists' attitudes. Wittgenstein's style of therapy had to step back behind Dewey's democratic commitment, because Rorty's therapeutic practice is meant to have a transforming and liberating effect and not the quietist and thus conservative sense of restoring an undistorted status quo ante. The double front line taken against metaphysics and scientism follows objectives for which Rorty coins effective slogans. He defends the "priority of democracy over philosophy" and the "priority of technology over theory." Philosophy and the sciences must make themselves useful, now that their success can no longer be measured in terms of whether statements correspond with a reality untouched by language and culture.
What counts is the contribution that philosophical and scientific practice can make as well to an ever more expanding consensus on shared interests and an improved mutual understanding on competing human needs as to the development of the means to satisfy them. Just as theory formation in the natural sciences serves its possible technical success, so philosophy serves democracy and freedom: "if we take care of political freedom, we get truth as a bonus." Be that as it may, philosophy can play a public role if it reflects sensitively on the pressing problems of the day and offers a diagnosis of his time. In this country, Richard Rorty like almost no other did indeed restore philosophy's public importance. It is a moot point whether his colleagues will thank him for that.
However, a philosopher who dons the role of a public intellectual can have recourse neither to the expert knowledge of the natural and social sciences nor even to the historical and aesthetic knowledge accumulated by the humanities. In his public interventions, Rorty makes a virtue of these shortcomings by turning the task of philosophy itself into a topic. He opts for metaphilosophical considerations, confronts the "scientific" philosophers with those who take their cue from literature. Like Nietzsche, he ponders the benefits and disadvantages of classical education, if in his own way: "All of these wonderful books are only rungs on a ladder that, with a bit of luck, one day we may be able to do without. If we stopped reading canonical philosophy books, we would be less aware of the forces that make us think and talk as we do. We would be less aware to grasp our contingency, less capable of being 'ironists'." [7]
So that is the one task of philosophy: to exercise its addresses in an awareness of the contingencies of life on earth, in particular the contingencies that impact on the presumed foundations, on what we take to be our "final" vocabularies. In this way, Rorty practiced something of what the ancients called "wisdom." And he used a word for this practice that is not by chance of religious origin, namely "edification." Private edification is of course only half of the business of philosophical communication. Public commitment is the other, even more important task of philosophy. As a pragmatist, Rorty can prompt citizens and elites in the world's leading power to remember their own tradition. He recommends this cultural resource as the key to interpreting the current situation.
Pragmatism is expressed by the spirit of great writers and great philosophers alike—Rorty repeatedly cites Emerson and Whitman, James and Dewey. And because this spirit is aware of its American origins, and also sees itself as a driving force of progressivism, all the pragmatist writers and philosophers more or less shared the profile of a leftist patriotism, that is one associated with cosmopolitanism. Rorty has the fortunate combination of his three rare talents to thank for the fact that he could draw on this heritage undividedly, for he was equally an important philosopher, a marvelous writer, and a successful political intellectual.
Notes
4. Thus, the title of Theodor W. Adorno's materialist critique of Husserl's epistemology.
5. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 59.
6. Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 36.
7. Eduardo Mendieta, ed., Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 79.
=
Let me conclude our commemoration of Richard Rorty with one word each on the roles he so gloriously mastered, that of the philosopher, the writer, and the left cosmopolitan patriot.
First, the philosopher. In his profession, Richard Rorty exchanged the most sophisticated arguments with the most prominent of his colleagues. He debated the concept of truth with Donald Davidson, he argued about realism and rationality with Hilary Putnam, about the concept of the mental with Daniel Dennet, on intersubjectivity and objectivity with John McDowell, and with his master student Robert Brandom on the status of facts. [8] On the European continent, his work is as strongly in evidence as it is in the English-speaking world, if not possibly more influential than it is here. Rorty mastered the philosophical idioms of both worlds. Two of his three philosophical heroes were, after all, Europeans. With his interpretive skills he did great service for Foucault and Derrida, not only in the United States, but also in Germany. And it was also he via whom we in Europe indirectly communicated with one another when we found it hard to reach an understanding between the parties to the East and West of the river Rhine.
As to the writer, we have to acknowledge the fact that among those rare philosophers who can write flawless scholarly prose, Richard Rorty came closest to the spirit of poetry. His strategy of an eye-opening renovation of philosophical jargon laid the foundations for the affinity between what he achieved with his texts and the world-disclosing power of literature. Down through the decades, no other colleague surprised me with new ideas and exciting formulations the way he did. Rorty overwhelms his readers with mind-boggling rearrangements of conceptual constellations, he shocks them with thrilling binary oppositions. He often transforms complex chains of thoughts into seemingly barbaric simplifications, but at second glance such dense formulas prove to contain innovative interpretations. Rorty plays with his readers' conventional expectations. With unusual series of names, he asks them to rethink connections. Sometimes it is only a matter of emphasis. If he names Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Annette Baier, and Robert Brandom in a single breath, then the subliminal discrepancy that disconcerts the reader is the real message—in this case, the reference to Annette Baier's great reconstruction of Hume's moral philosophy, which Rorty wishes to emphasize as an "intellectual advance."
Finally, in Rorty we encounter an old-fashioned sort of leftist intellectual who believes in education and social reform. What he finds most important about a democratic constitution is that it provides the oppressed and encumbered with instruments with which they "can defend themselves against the wealthy and the powerful." The focus is on abolishing institutions that continue exploitation and degradation. And it is on promoting a tolerant society that keeps people together in solidarity despite growing diversity and recognizes no authority as binding that cannot be derived from deliberation and revisable agreements of all involved. Rorty terms himself a red diaper-anticommunist baby and a teenage Cold War liberal. But that past did not leave the slightest trace of resentment in him. He was completely free of the scars so typical of former radicals as well as of many of the older and some of the younger liberal hawks. If he gave a somewhat trenchant political response, then it was the one he directed against a cultural Left which he felt had bid farewell to the efforts of the arena: "Insofar as a Left becomes spectatorial and retrospective, it ceases to be a Left."
With Achieving our Country, his most personal and moving book, Richard Rorty pinned his colors to the mast of an American patriotism that the world need not fear. In the melody of this text we find a combination of the exceptional status of the world's oldest democracy—one that can be proud of the normative substance of its principles—and the sensitivity for the new and now global diversity of cultural perspectives and voices. What is new about this global pluralism compared with the charged pluralism of a national society is the fact that within the inclusive frame of an encompassing international community, the dangers of disintegration can no longer be diverted smartly onto some enemy on the outside. Today, evolutionary anthropology with its comparative research into children and chimpanzees of the same age catches up with an old pragmatist insight when it rediscovers a "perspective-taking" ability to be something on which we humans have a monopoly. Bertolt Brecht suggested reciprocal perspective-taking is the essential condition of true patriotism:
And because we improve this country,
We love it and shield it.
And it may appear most dearest to us
As other people's find their own.
Dick knew those lines from the famous children's hymn and knew that even for a super-power cosmopolitanism is not the same thing as the global export of its own way of life. He knew that a democracy only preserves its robust and "athletic" character by self-criticism. In an interview conducted on September 11, 2001, he warned against Bush's "arrogant anti-internationalism." He reminded us instead of the very idea that had, in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War, prompted an American president to envisage a new design for a future world order and to push the establishment of the United Nations. Yet, Rorty was not unrealistic in how he saw things: "That scenario now sounds less plausible. But it is the only one I can envisage that might actually have good results." And he then added a sentence that expresses the spirit of this person and also the spirit of the best tradition this country has brought forth: "There is, to be sure, plenty of reason for pessimism, but it would be better to do what one can to get people to follow an improbable scenario than to simply throw up one's hands." [9]
That spirit is to be found throughout Richard Rorty's oeuvre and will continue to live with and through it.
Click here for part 1 of this address, and here for part 2.
Notes
8. Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and his Critics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
9. Mendieta, ed., Take Care of Freedom, p. 101.
from here
Friday, October 26, 2007
Romantik. Eine deutsche Affäre
"When Rüdiger Safranski had completed his doctorate at the Freie Unversität, Berlin, he wished to write a habilitation thesis on the topic of the German Romantic E.T.A. Hoffman. The editor at Hanser to whom he offered the idea replied: ‘If you write a readable book about E.T.A. Hoffman we shall print it, and if you write a habilitation thesis for the university, we shan’t’. Safranski chose the former course, wrote a literary biography at a time when academia was withdrawing more and more into its ivory tower, scored a tremendous popular success with later monographs on Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Schiller, and now appears frequently on philosophical talk-shows, evoking no little envy and resentment from fellow academics.
His latest book is divided into two sections, the first on the German Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century, the second on its ideological tendencies and after-effects. He offers as a basic definition of German Romanticism Novalis’s famous formulation: ‘By lending the commonplace a lofty meaning, the customary an aura of mystery…, the finite a semblance of the infinite, I romanticise it’ – adding, to emphasise the rediscovery of the numinous, his own adaptation of Clauswitz’s definition of war: ‘Romanticism is a continuation of religion by other means’.
He is of the opinion that Romanticism ‘is not just a German phenomenon but has assumed a special impress in Germany, leading to a flight from reality into the Self and the distant past and to what György Lukács called ‘the German malaise’ and Helmuth Plessner ‘the belated nation’; and from this follows an important debate on whether Romanticism contributed to preparing the ground for Nazism. He finds that Romanticism contained no traces of the biologism and racism of the Nazi Movement, but sees to what extent a romantic mentality can fall prey to political extremism, so that even the students’ revolt of 1968 is to some extent a manifestation of it. He concludes that the Romantic Movement as an epoch is past, but romanticism as a mindset has remained – adding as a warning that whenever it flows into politics, it should contain a strong admixture of realism. A warning to be heeded, and perhaps not by Germans alone, on a theme with still topical and unsettling ramifications."
from here
His latest book is divided into two sections, the first on the German Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century, the second on its ideological tendencies and after-effects. He offers as a basic definition of German Romanticism Novalis’s famous formulation: ‘By lending the commonplace a lofty meaning, the customary an aura of mystery…, the finite a semblance of the infinite, I romanticise it’ – adding, to emphasise the rediscovery of the numinous, his own adaptation of Clauswitz’s definition of war: ‘Romanticism is a continuation of religion by other means’.
He is of the opinion that Romanticism ‘is not just a German phenomenon but has assumed a special impress in Germany, leading to a flight from reality into the Self and the distant past and to what György Lukács called ‘the German malaise’ and Helmuth Plessner ‘the belated nation’; and from this follows an important debate on whether Romanticism contributed to preparing the ground for Nazism. He finds that Romanticism contained no traces of the biologism and racism of the Nazi Movement, but sees to what extent a romantic mentality can fall prey to political extremism, so that even the students’ revolt of 1968 is to some extent a manifestation of it. He concludes that the Romantic Movement as an epoch is past, but romanticism as a mindset has remained – adding as a warning that whenever it flows into politics, it should contain a strong admixture of realism. A warning to be heeded, and perhaps not by Germans alone, on a theme with still topical and unsettling ramifications."
from here
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Challenging Habermas' response to the European Union democratic deficit
Jonathan Bowman
from here
Jürgen Habermas' response to the European Union democratic deficit calls for a minimal threshold of democratic legislation through an explicit constitutional founding. He defends a model of freedom as autonomous self-determination by proposing to tie basic rights in the EU to a univocal form of European-wide popular sovereignty. Instead of constructing a common European political identity, I appeal to the novel democratic potential of institutions in the EU such as the Open Method of Coordination for mediating overlapping sovereignties in accord with freedom as non-domination. The concluding example of basic rights to effective participation for immigrants and permanent minorities illustrates the strengths of Iris Young's and James Bohman's republican views of non-domination over Habermas' call for a European-wide collective willing.
from here
Friday, September 28, 2007
Read key continental philosophy articles in EJP
"We are pleased to offer free access to selected key articles published over in
European Journal of Philosophy on continental philosophy. To access these
articles, please click on the article titles below!"
Outside ethics
by Raymond Geuss
Religion in the public sphere
by Jürgen Habermas
Hegel's critique of pure mechanism and the philosophical appeal of the 'logic'
project
by James Kreines
Kant and non-conceptual content
by Robert Hanna
European Journal of Philosophy on continental philosophy. To access these
articles, please click on the article titles below!"
Outside ethics
by Raymond Geuss
Religion in the public sphere
by Jürgen Habermas
Hegel's critique of pure mechanism and the philosophical appeal of the 'logic'
project
by James Kreines
Kant and non-conceptual content
by Robert Hanna
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965
Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, Polity Press, 2006, 272pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780745630137.
Reviewed by David Ingram, Loyola University Chicago
"As a student-activist during the Vietnam War my first introduction to Adorno and Critical Theory came by way of my philosophical apprenticeship under Herbert Marcuse, whose work I studied assiduously, despite his own modest advice directing me to read classical figures in the philosophy of history, notably Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, with an occasional nod to contemporary figures, including Sartre (who was still much in vogue) and several of his own former colleagues, uppermost being Adorno. At the time this advice was given I was too ignorant of Adorno's life and thought to appreciate fully the irony of Marcuse's gesture. Marcuse had been embraced as the guru of the very student movement that had scorned Adorno for allegedly being a mere academic pedant who was afraid to commit himself wholeheartedly to the revolutionary task of building a new emancipated society. As is well known, Adorno's last course on dialectical thinking, which he began in the summer semester of 1969, never progressed beyond a few lectures to its central theme due to frequent interruptions by students in attendance. That's a shame, because the theme in question -- the classical Marxian theme concerning the relationship between theory and practice and specifically the relationship between history (and philosophy of history) and revolutionary practice -- was obviously pertinent to their concerns. Yet one need go no further than the lecture series on history and freedom delivered in 1964-1965 to discern the core of Adorno's argument on this topic -- a topic that emerged with considerable urgency in Adornos' thought as early as 1932, when he taught a course on Lessing's Education of the Human Race with Paul Tillich, who also directed his second dissertation, and continued up until his last writings, 'On Subject and Object' and 'Marginalia to Theory and Practice,' both of which contain material that doubtless would have been included in that last lecture series."
full here
Reviewed by David Ingram, Loyola University Chicago
"As a student-activist during the Vietnam War my first introduction to Adorno and Critical Theory came by way of my philosophical apprenticeship under Herbert Marcuse, whose work I studied assiduously, despite his own modest advice directing me to read classical figures in the philosophy of history, notably Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, with an occasional nod to contemporary figures, including Sartre (who was still much in vogue) and several of his own former colleagues, uppermost being Adorno. At the time this advice was given I was too ignorant of Adorno's life and thought to appreciate fully the irony of Marcuse's gesture. Marcuse had been embraced as the guru of the very student movement that had scorned Adorno for allegedly being a mere academic pedant who was afraid to commit himself wholeheartedly to the revolutionary task of building a new emancipated society. As is well known, Adorno's last course on dialectical thinking, which he began in the summer semester of 1969, never progressed beyond a few lectures to its central theme due to frequent interruptions by students in attendance. That's a shame, because the theme in question -- the classical Marxian theme concerning the relationship between theory and practice and specifically the relationship between history (and philosophy of history) and revolutionary practice -- was obviously pertinent to their concerns. Yet one need go no further than the lecture series on history and freedom delivered in 1964-1965 to discern the core of Adorno's argument on this topic -- a topic that emerged with considerable urgency in Adornos' thought as early as 1932, when he taught a course on Lessing's Education of the Human Race with Paul Tillich, who also directed his second dissertation, and continued up until his last writings, 'On Subject and Object' and 'Marginalia to Theory and Practice,' both of which contain material that doubtless would have been included in that last lecture series."
full here
Monday, September 3, 2007
Download the top 5 articles
Download the top 5 articles from Volume 13 of International Journal of Philosophical Studies
The International Journal of Philosophical Studies publishes academic articles of the highest quality in all areas of philosophy. Routledge are pleased to give you the opportunity to download the top 5 downloads from Volume 13 of the journal for free. The top 5 downloads from Volume 13 of IJPS were:
The Nature of Transcendental Arguments
Mark Sacks
Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory
J. M. Bernstein
We, Heirs of Enlightenment: Critical Theory, Democracy and Social
Science
James Bohman
When conscience calls, will Dasein answer? Heideggerian authenticity and
the possibility of ethical life
Mariana Ortega
Husserl's concept of the 'transcendental person': Another look at the
Husserl-Heidegger relationship
Sebastian Luft
To take advantage of this offer, please visit:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/riph_top5
For more information about the journal, visit the journal homepage at
www.informaworld.com/riph or contact the editor.
The International Journal of Philosophical Studies publishes academic articles of the highest quality in all areas of philosophy. Routledge are pleased to give you the opportunity to download the top 5 downloads from Volume 13 of the journal for free. The top 5 downloads from Volume 13 of IJPS were:
The Nature of Transcendental Arguments
Mark Sacks
Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory
J. M. Bernstein
We, Heirs of Enlightenment: Critical Theory, Democracy and Social
Science
James Bohman
When conscience calls, will Dasein answer? Heideggerian authenticity and
the possibility of ethical life
Mariana Ortega
Husserl's concept of the 'transcendental person': Another look at the
Husserl-Heidegger relationship
Sebastian Luft
To take advantage of this offer, please visit:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/riph_top5
For more information about the journal, visit the journal homepage at
www.informaworld.com/riph or contact the editor.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Staying Alive: Adorno and Habermas on Self-Preservation under Late Capitalism
Abstract
Rethinking Marxism, Volume 18, Issue 3 July 2006 , pages 433 - 447
I explore the points of contention between Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas that account for their divergent claims about self-preservation, and maintain that Adorno has the more defensible view. Although both thinkers agree that the task of material self-preservation has largely been assumed by the welfare state and the capitalist economy, Adorno views this development as destructive and self-destructive while Habermas thinks it has benefited the lifeworld by relieving it of the burden of materially reproducing itself. Unlike Habermas, who rejects the idea of a collective subject, Adorno believes that only such a subject, conscious of its instinctual impulses and directing them toward the preservation of humanity and the environing world on which it depends for its survival, would make self-preservation rational.
Rethinking Marxism, Volume 18, Issue 3 July 2006 , pages 433 - 447
Habermas and Foucault: Deliberative Democracy and Strategic State Analysis
Contemporary Political Theory, Volume 6, Number 2, May 2007 , pp. 218-245(28)
Abstract:
Abstract:
The paper explores ways to bring the approaches of J. Habermas and M. Foucault into a productive dialogue. In particular, it argues that Habermas's concept of deliberative democracy can and should be complemented by a strategic analysis of the state as it is found in Foucault's studies of governmentality. While deliberative democracy is a critical theory of democracy that provides normative knowledge about the legitimacy of a given system, it is not well equipped to generate knowledge that could inform the choice of strategies employed by (collective) actors from civil society — especially deliberative democrats — vis-à-vis the state to pursue their goals. This kind of strategic knowledge about strengths and vulnerabilities of a given state is provided by Foucault's reading of the state as driven by varying governing rationalities. Since, particularly in his later works, Habermas finds strategic action normatively acceptable under certain circumstances, I argue that societal actors could profit from an integrated approach that incorporates Foucault's strategic analysis into the framework of deliberative democracy. This approach would yield critical knowledge of both a normative and strategic, action-guiding nature
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Deliberating Groups vs. Prediction Markets (or Hayek's Challenge to Habermas)
Subject Headings:
Group decision making.
Forecasting.
Habermas, Jürgen.
Hayek, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899-1992.
Social epistemology.
Abstract:
For multiple reasons, deliberating groups often converge on falsehood rather than truth. Individual errors may be amplified rather than cured. Group members may fall victim to a bad cascade, either informational or reputational. Deliberators may emphasize shared information at the expense of uniquely held information. Finally, group polarization may lead even rational people to unjustified extremism. By contrast, prediction markets often produce accurate results, because they create strong incentives for revelation of privately held knowledge and succeed in aggregating widely dispersed information. The success of prediction markets offers a set of lessons for increasing the likelihood that groups can obtain the information that their members have.
from here
Group decision making.
Forecasting.
Habermas, Jürgen.
Hayek, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899-1992.
Social epistemology.
Abstract:
For multiple reasons, deliberating groups often converge on falsehood rather than truth. Individual errors may be amplified rather than cured. Group members may fall victim to a bad cascade, either informational or reputational. Deliberators may emphasize shared information at the expense of uniquely held information. Finally, group polarization may lead even rational people to unjustified extremism. By contrast, prediction markets often produce accurate results, because they create strong incentives for revelation of privately held knowledge and succeed in aggregating widely dispersed information. The success of prediction markets offers a set of lessons for increasing the likelihood that groups can obtain the information that their members have.
from here
Friday, June 15, 2007
Philosopher, poet and friend
Jürgen Habermas writes an obiturary for American philosopher Richard Rorty
I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
Three and a half decades ago, Richard Rorty loosened himself from the corset of a profession whose conventions had become too narrow - not to elude the discipline of analytic thinking, but to take philosophy along untrodden paths. Rorty had a masterful command of the handicraft of our profession. In duels with the best among his peers, with Donald Davidson, Hillary Putnam or Daniel Dennett, he was a constant source of the subtlest, most sophisticated arguments. But he never forgot that philosophy - above and beyond objections by colleagues - mustn't ignore the problems posed by life as we live it.
Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues - and not only them - over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher. And it owes much to the unforgettable rhetorical skill and flawless prose of a writer who was always ready to shock readers with unaccustomed strategies of representation, unexpected oppositional concepts and new vocabularies - one of Rorty's favourite terms. Rorty's talent as an essayist spanned the range from Friedrich Schlegel to Surrealism.
The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this impression doesn't do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was often shy and withdrawn - and always sensitive to others.
One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."
from here
I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
Three and a half decades ago, Richard Rorty loosened himself from the corset of a profession whose conventions had become too narrow - not to elude the discipline of analytic thinking, but to take philosophy along untrodden paths. Rorty had a masterful command of the handicraft of our profession. In duels with the best among his peers, with Donald Davidson, Hillary Putnam or Daniel Dennett, he was a constant source of the subtlest, most sophisticated arguments. But he never forgot that philosophy - above and beyond objections by colleagues - mustn't ignore the problems posed by life as we live it.
Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues - and not only them - over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher. And it owes much to the unforgettable rhetorical skill and flawless prose of a writer who was always ready to shock readers with unaccustomed strategies of representation, unexpected oppositional concepts and new vocabularies - one of Rorty's favourite terms. Rorty's talent as an essayist spanned the range from Friedrich Schlegel to Surrealism.
The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this impression doesn't do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was often shy and withdrawn - and always sensitive to others.
One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."
from here
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Zum Tod von Richard Rorty
Immer wieder schockiert
Richard Rorty ist gestorben. Ein Nachruf von Jürgen Habermas auf den Philosophen, Poeten, Bush-Kritiker und Freund.
Von Jürgen Habermas
Vor ziemlich genau einem Jahr trifft die Nachricht per e-mail ein. Wie so oft in den letzten Jahren äußert sich Rorty resigniert über den "Kriegspräsidenten" Bush, dessen Politik ihn, den Patrioten, der Zeit seines Lebens sein Land hatte verbessern wollen, tief bedrückt. Erst nach drei, nach vier Absätzen der sarkastischen Analyse kommt der unerwartete Satz: "Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." Wie um den Schreck des Lesers aufzufangen, fügt er scherzend hinzu, seine Tochter habe die Hypothese, dass diese Art des Krebses von "zuviel Heidegger-Lektüre" herrühre.
Richard Rorty hat sich vor dreieinhalb Jahrzehnten aus dem Korsett eines Faches, dessen Konventionen ihm zu eng geworden waren, gelöst - nicht um sich von der Disziplin des analytischen Denkens zu befreien, sondern um fortan auf unausgetretenen Pfaden philosophieren zu können.
Das Handwerk der Profession beherrschte er perfekt. Im Duell mit den Besten unter seinen peers, mit Davidson oder Putnam, oder Dennett, war er stets auf der Höhe der subtilsten und scharfsinnigsten Argumente. Aber er hatte nicht vergessen, dass die Philosophie über den Einwänden der Fachgenossen nicht die Probleme vergessen darf, die aus dem Leben auf uns zukommen.
Unter den zeitgenössischen Philosophen kenne ich niemanden, der wie Rorty seine Kollegen - und nicht nur sie - über die Jahrzehnte mit neuen Perspektiven, neuen Einsichten, neuen Formulierungen überfallen und in Atem gehalten hat. Diese großartige Kreativität verdankt sich auch dem romantischen Geist des Poeten, der sich hinter dem wissenschaftlichen Philosophen nicht mehr länger versteckte.
Dem Ironiker ist nichts heilig
Sie verdankt sich der unvergleichlichen rhetorischen Fertigkeit und makellosen Prosa eines Schriftstellers, der seine Leser mit ungewohnten Darstellungsstrategien, unerwarteten Oppositionsbegriffen, neuen Vokabularen - eine von Rortys Lieblingsformeln - immer wieder schockiert hat. Rortys essayistische Kunst bewegt sich zwischen Friedrich Schlegel und dem Surrealismus.
Die Ironie und die Leidenschaft, der spielerische und der polemische Ton eines Intellektuellen, der weltweit Denkweisen revolutioniert und Einfluss ausgeübt hat, erwecken den Eindruck eines robusten Temperaments. Dieser Eindruck täuscht über die zarte und verletzbare Natur einer Person, die oft schüchtern und zurückgezogen - und immer einfühlsam war.
Eine kleine autobiographische Notiz trägt den Titel "Wilde Orchideen und Trotzki". Rorty beschreibt, wie er als Junge in der blühenden Hügellandschaft im Nordwesten von New Jersey herumstreift und den betäubenden Duft der Orchideen einsaugt. Zur selben Zeit findet er in seinem linken Elternhaus ein faszinierendes Buch, das Trotzki gegen Stalin verteidigt. Damals entsteht die Vision, mit der der junge Rorty aufs College geht: die Philosophie ist dazu da, die überirdische Schönheit der Orchideen mit Trotzkis Traum von der Gerechtigkeit auf Erden zu versöhnen.
Dem Ironiker Rorty ist nichts heilig. Nach etwas "Heiligem" gefragt, antwortet der strikte Atheist am Ende seines Lebens mit Sätzen, die an den jungen Hegel erinnern: "Der Sinn für Heiliges hat mit meiner Hoffnung zu tun, dass meine entfernten Nachkommen in einer globalen Zivilisation leben werden, worin Liebe so ziemlich das einzige Gesetz ist."
from here
Richard Rorty ist gestorben. Ein Nachruf von Jürgen Habermas auf den Philosophen, Poeten, Bush-Kritiker und Freund.
Von Jürgen Habermas
Vor ziemlich genau einem Jahr trifft die Nachricht per e-mail ein. Wie so oft in den letzten Jahren äußert sich Rorty resigniert über den "Kriegspräsidenten" Bush, dessen Politik ihn, den Patrioten, der Zeit seines Lebens sein Land hatte verbessern wollen, tief bedrückt. Erst nach drei, nach vier Absätzen der sarkastischen Analyse kommt der unerwartete Satz: "Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." Wie um den Schreck des Lesers aufzufangen, fügt er scherzend hinzu, seine Tochter habe die Hypothese, dass diese Art des Krebses von "zuviel Heidegger-Lektüre" herrühre.
Richard Rorty hat sich vor dreieinhalb Jahrzehnten aus dem Korsett eines Faches, dessen Konventionen ihm zu eng geworden waren, gelöst - nicht um sich von der Disziplin des analytischen Denkens zu befreien, sondern um fortan auf unausgetretenen Pfaden philosophieren zu können.
Das Handwerk der Profession beherrschte er perfekt. Im Duell mit den Besten unter seinen peers, mit Davidson oder Putnam, oder Dennett, war er stets auf der Höhe der subtilsten und scharfsinnigsten Argumente. Aber er hatte nicht vergessen, dass die Philosophie über den Einwänden der Fachgenossen nicht die Probleme vergessen darf, die aus dem Leben auf uns zukommen.
Unter den zeitgenössischen Philosophen kenne ich niemanden, der wie Rorty seine Kollegen - und nicht nur sie - über die Jahrzehnte mit neuen Perspektiven, neuen Einsichten, neuen Formulierungen überfallen und in Atem gehalten hat. Diese großartige Kreativität verdankt sich auch dem romantischen Geist des Poeten, der sich hinter dem wissenschaftlichen Philosophen nicht mehr länger versteckte.
Dem Ironiker ist nichts heilig
Sie verdankt sich der unvergleichlichen rhetorischen Fertigkeit und makellosen Prosa eines Schriftstellers, der seine Leser mit ungewohnten Darstellungsstrategien, unerwarteten Oppositionsbegriffen, neuen Vokabularen - eine von Rortys Lieblingsformeln - immer wieder schockiert hat. Rortys essayistische Kunst bewegt sich zwischen Friedrich Schlegel und dem Surrealismus.
Die Ironie und die Leidenschaft, der spielerische und der polemische Ton eines Intellektuellen, der weltweit Denkweisen revolutioniert und Einfluss ausgeübt hat, erwecken den Eindruck eines robusten Temperaments. Dieser Eindruck täuscht über die zarte und verletzbare Natur einer Person, die oft schüchtern und zurückgezogen - und immer einfühlsam war.
Eine kleine autobiographische Notiz trägt den Titel "Wilde Orchideen und Trotzki". Rorty beschreibt, wie er als Junge in der blühenden Hügellandschaft im Nordwesten von New Jersey herumstreift und den betäubenden Duft der Orchideen einsaugt. Zur selben Zeit findet er in seinem linken Elternhaus ein faszinierendes Buch, das Trotzki gegen Stalin verteidigt. Damals entsteht die Vision, mit der der junge Rorty aufs College geht: die Philosophie ist dazu da, die überirdische Schönheit der Orchideen mit Trotzkis Traum von der Gerechtigkeit auf Erden zu versöhnen.
Dem Ironiker Rorty ist nichts heilig. Nach etwas "Heiligem" gefragt, antwortet der strikte Atheist am Ende seines Lebens mit Sätzen, die an den jungen Hegel erinnern: "Der Sinn für Heiliges hat mit meiner Hoffnung zu tun, dass meine entfernten Nachkommen in einer globalen Zivilisation leben werden, worin Liebe so ziemlich das einzige Gesetz ist."
from here
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
CFP Society for European Philosophy
Call for Papers:
Society for European Philosophy &
Forum for European Philosophy
3rd Annual Joint Conference
The University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK
September 8th, 9th,10th 2007
Plenary Speakers:
Frederick Neuhouser (Columbia)
Cristina Lafont (Northwestern)
Alex Düttmann (Goldsmiths)
Rüdiger Bittner (Bielefeld)
Abstracts of no more than 300 words to be submitted by June 1st 2007
either
in electronic form to J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk or by mail to:
Forum for European Philosophy
Room J5, Cowdray House
Portugal Street
London School of Economics, London, WC2A 2AE
For more information see
Society for European Philosophy &
Forum for European Philosophy
3rd Annual Joint Conference
The University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK
September 8th, 9th,10th 2007
Plenary Speakers:
Frederick Neuhouser (Columbia)
Cristina Lafont (Northwestern)
Alex Düttmann (Goldsmiths)
Rüdiger Bittner (Bielefeld)
Abstracts of no more than 300 words to be submitted by June 1st 2007
either
in electronic form to J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk or by mail to:
Forum for European Philosophy
Room J5, Cowdray House
Portugal Street
London School of Economics, London, WC2A 2AE
For more information see
Thursday, April 26, 2007
The Language Game of Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will: How can epistemic dualism be reconciled with ontological monism?
Abstract
In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of attributing responsibility and holding one another accountable, illustrating this via a discussion of legal discourse regarding the attribution of responsibility for criminal acts. I then turn to the practical limits on agents' scientific self-objectivation, limits that turn out to be mirrored philosophically in the conceptual problems that plague reductionist strategies. Having shown that free will is rooted in unavoidable performative presuppositions belonging to agents' participant perspective, I then take up the difficult issue of how to reconcile an epistemic dualism of participant and observer perspectives with the assumption of ontological monism. I critically review a range of proposed physicalist solutions, including non-reductionist and (standard) compatibilist approaches. An underlying problem with scientistic, physicalist approaches is the methodological fiction of an exclusive 'view from nowhere' which relies on the problematic move of disengaging the objectivating perspective of the scientific observer from the investigators' participant perspective of those engaged in scientific practice. Since there is no way of getting around the requisite complementarity of both the observer's encounter with the objective world and the participant's involvement in shared lifeworld practices, the remaining option is to take an epistemological turn. But even the recognition that science is ultimately constituted from within the lifeworld still leaves us with the question as to how the human mind can understand itself as the product of natural evolution. I conclude with some tentative suggestions as to how this difficult question might be addressed.
Keywords: free will; compatibilism; physicalism; scientism; participant perspective; performative presuppositions
Free access
In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of attributing responsibility and holding one another accountable, illustrating this via a discussion of legal discourse regarding the attribution of responsibility for criminal acts. I then turn to the practical limits on agents' scientific self-objectivation, limits that turn out to be mirrored philosophically in the conceptual problems that plague reductionist strategies. Having shown that free will is rooted in unavoidable performative presuppositions belonging to agents' participant perspective, I then take up the difficult issue of how to reconcile an epistemic dualism of participant and observer perspectives with the assumption of ontological monism. I critically review a range of proposed physicalist solutions, including non-reductionist and (standard) compatibilist approaches. An underlying problem with scientistic, physicalist approaches is the methodological fiction of an exclusive 'view from nowhere' which relies on the problematic move of disengaging the objectivating perspective of the scientific observer from the investigators' participant perspective of those engaged in scientific practice. Since there is no way of getting around the requisite complementarity of both the observer's encounter with the objective world and the participant's involvement in shared lifeworld practices, the remaining option is to take an epistemological turn. But even the recognition that science is ultimately constituted from within the lifeworld still leaves us with the question as to how the human mind can understand itself as the product of natural evolution. I conclude with some tentative suggestions as to how this difficult question might be addressed.
Keywords: free will; compatibilism; physicalism; scientism; participant perspective; performative presuppositions
Free access
Sunday, March 11, 2007
A Philosophy of the First-Person Singular: Vincent Descombes
Abstract
According to Emile Benveniste, there are only 2 grammatical persons (the first and the second) because being a grammatical person is a matter of taking part actively in a dialogical act of speech. The so-called third person should rather be called the nonperson, the ‘‘absent’’ of the dialogue. Paul Ricoeur has questioned this interpretation of the third person in so far as it meets a philosophical dogma once maintained by Jean-Paul Sartre in his theory of the novel. Sartre claimed that the author of a novel when introducing a character into the narrative should choose between the first-person point of view and the third-person one. Ricoeur has rightly argued that this was not the case, as it is obviously possible to use the grammatical third person in order to present the personal thoughts and feelings of somebody else. If one could not do that, it would not be possible to consider ‘‘oneself as another.’’
Download the article for free
According to Emile Benveniste, there are only 2 grammatical persons (the first and the second) because being a grammatical person is a matter of taking part actively in a dialogical act of speech. The so-called third person should rather be called the nonperson, the ‘‘absent’’ of the dialogue. Paul Ricoeur has questioned this interpretation of the third person in so far as it meets a philosophical dogma once maintained by Jean-Paul Sartre in his theory of the novel. Sartre claimed that the author of a novel when introducing a character into the narrative should choose between the first-person point of view and the third-person one. Ricoeur has rightly argued that this was not the case, as it is obviously possible to use the grammatical third person in order to present the personal thoughts and feelings of somebody else. If one could not do that, it would not be possible to consider ‘‘oneself as another.’’
Download the article for free
Political Communication in Media Society
Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research1
Jürgen Habermas
Philosophy Department, Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt, GermanyJürgen Habermas1 Philosophy Department, Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
Abstract:
I first compare the deliberative to the liberal and the republican models of democracy, and consider possible references to empirical research and then examine what empirical evidence there is for the assumption that political deliberation develops a truth-tracking potential. The main parts of the paper serve to dispel prima facie doubts about the empirical content and the applicability of the communication model of deliberative politics. It moreover highlights 2 critical conditions: mediated political communication in the public sphere can facilitate deliberative legitimation processes in complex societies only if a self-regulating media system gains independence from its social environments and if anonymous audiences grant a feedback between an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society.
Communication Theory
Volume 16 Issue 4 Page 411 - November 2006
Jürgen Habermas
Philosophy Department, Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt, GermanyJürgen Habermas1 Philosophy Department, Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
Abstract:
I first compare the deliberative to the liberal and the republican models of democracy, and consider possible references to empirical research and then examine what empirical evidence there is for the assumption that political deliberation develops a truth-tracking potential. The main parts of the paper serve to dispel prima facie doubts about the empirical content and the applicability of the communication model of deliberative politics. It moreover highlights 2 critical conditions: mediated political communication in the public sphere can facilitate deliberative legitimation processes in complex societies only if a self-regulating media system gains independence from its social environments and if anonymous audiences grant a feedback between an informed elite discourse and a responsive civil society.
Communication Theory
Volume 16 Issue 4 Page 411 - November 2006
Monday, March 5, 2007
Habermas and Violence
Panel "Habermas and Violence" - during the Political Theory Workshops, Fourth Annual Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 3 - 5 September 2007
We are currently looking for contributions to the panel on "Habermas and Violence" to be held at the Fourth Annual conference of the Political Theory Workshops (see http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/polphil/news/event.php?id=82). We are specifically looking at the writings of Jurgen Habermas not only because he is one of the most prominent political thinkers and public intellectuals of our era, but also because he has continuously attempted to bring critical theory to bear on contemporary political affairs. The aim of this panel is thererefore precisely to investigate what problems we encounter when applying his normative models of discourse ethics and communicative action to concrete situations. Do the idealising structures have a totalising and repressive effect on the concrete content? What kind of relationship exists beteen the real and the ideal? We are, therefore, particularly interested in exploring the application of Habermas in a variety of contexts relating to violence, including but not limited to: feminist critiques of his discursive model, conflict and International Relations, issues of civil disobedience, and questions of Otherness. Our definition of violence in this panel is necessarily quite broad. We are interested in the application of Habermas's framework to external affairs as a form of conflict resolution as well in the potential problems of 'violence' that permeate Habermas's own work.
Should you be interested in submitting a short abstract and presenting a paper during the conference, then please contact us. Or should you wish to discuss an idea, then please also feel free to contact either Vivienne Boon, University of Liverpool (vivienne DOT boon AT liverpool DOT ac DOT uk) or Naomi Head, University of Leeds (naomi DOT head AT talk21 DOT com).
We are currently looking for contributions to the panel on "Habermas and Violence" to be held at the Fourth Annual conference of the Political Theory Workshops (see http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/polphil/news/event.php?id=82). We are specifically looking at the writings of Jurgen Habermas not only because he is one of the most prominent political thinkers and public intellectuals of our era, but also because he has continuously attempted to bring critical theory to bear on contemporary political affairs. The aim of this panel is thererefore precisely to investigate what problems we encounter when applying his normative models of discourse ethics and communicative action to concrete situations. Do the idealising structures have a totalising and repressive effect on the concrete content? What kind of relationship exists beteen the real and the ideal? We are, therefore, particularly interested in exploring the application of Habermas in a variety of contexts relating to violence, including but not limited to: feminist critiques of his discursive model, conflict and International Relations, issues of civil disobedience, and questions of Otherness. Our definition of violence in this panel is necessarily quite broad. We are interested in the application of Habermas's framework to external affairs as a form of conflict resolution as well in the potential problems of 'violence' that permeate Habermas's own work.
Should you be interested in submitting a short abstract and presenting a paper during the conference, then please contact us. Or should you wish to discuss an idea, then please also feel free to contact either Vivienne Boon, University of Liverpool (vivienne DOT boon AT liverpool DOT ac DOT uk) or Naomi Head, University of Leeds (naomi DOT head AT talk21 DOT com).
Thursday, February 22, 2007
The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion
Book Description
"Two of the worlds great contemporary thinkers--theologian and churchman Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and Jurgen Habermas, philosopher and Neo-Marxist social critic--discuss and debate aspects of secularization, and the role of reason and religion in a free society. These insightful essays are the result of a remarkable dialogue between the two men, sponsored by the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, a little over a year before Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope.
Jurgen Habermas has surprised many observers with his call for "the secular society to acquire a new understanding of religious convictions", as Florian Schuller, director of the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, describes it his foreword. Habermas discusses whether secular reason provides sufficient grounds for a democratic constitutional state. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI argues for the necessity of certain moral principles for maintaining a free state, and for the importance of genuine reason and authentic religion, rather than what he calls "pathologies of reason and religion", in order to uphold the states moral foundations. Both men insist that proponents of secular reason and religious conviction should learn from each other, even as they differ over the particular ways that mutual learning should occur."
from here
"Two of the worlds great contemporary thinkers--theologian and churchman Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and Jurgen Habermas, philosopher and Neo-Marxist social critic--discuss and debate aspects of secularization, and the role of reason and religion in a free society. These insightful essays are the result of a remarkable dialogue between the two men, sponsored by the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, a little over a year before Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope.
Jurgen Habermas has surprised many observers with his call for "the secular society to acquire a new understanding of religious convictions", as Florian Schuller, director of the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, describes it his foreword. Habermas discusses whether secular reason provides sufficient grounds for a democratic constitutional state. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI argues for the necessity of certain moral principles for maintaining a free state, and for the importance of genuine reason and authentic religion, rather than what he calls "pathologies of reason and religion", in order to uphold the states moral foundations. Both men insist that proponents of secular reason and religious conviction should learn from each other, even as they differ over the particular ways that mutual learning should occur."
from here
Friday, February 16, 2007
Fundamentalism and republican citizenship
Fundamentalism and republican citizenship
In a remarkable reformulation of his original concept of communicative action, Habermas’s writing on multiculturalism makes the inclusion of the cultural ‘other’ central to the project of democratic society.4 Given the globalizing tendencies inherent in modern society, he argues, contemporary democracies can no longer define criteria of belonging in terms of ethnicity or cultural homogeneity.5 In these inevitably plural societies, criteria for citizenship must be tied to the acceptance of a political framework, defined by the constitution, rather than by the prerogatives of majority culture. In this reorientation from the culturally defined nation-state to a ‘republican’ state, Habermas argues, ‘the majority culture must detach itself from its fusion with the general political culture in which all citizens share equally; otherwise it dictates the parameters of political discourses from the outset’.6 The emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II, he suggests, is an example of such a democratic framework. Habermas argues that in the postwar period a patriotic commitment to Germany’s democratic constitution has replaced notions of nationality based on shared ethnic origins or a set of norms and values. In this perspective of constitutional patriotism, the inclusion of other cultural traditions in the national framework is both imperative and possible. Imperative because, in the context of Habermasian discourse ethics, any truth claim that does not open itself to the challenge of all competing claims within a discursive community automatically loses its legitimacy. Possible because once the identity of a political community is detached from a particular cultural tradition, the bond of a shared political culture is strong enough to hold society together. By differentiating the realm of ‘general political culture’ from that of the various cultural traditions from which individual citizens draw their norms and values, Habermas gains a dynamic model of a political community in which the basic rules that govern the community can change over time. This community is shaped not so much in direct negotiations between different cultural traditions but as the result of partially shared, if differently interpreted and discursively mediated, experiences.
Despite the persistent social marginalization that continues to plague many Muslim communities across Europe, and despite occasional acts of violence in the name of Islam, there are clear signs of such a process. José Casanova has called this development that has made Muslim communities and organizations increasingly active players in Europe’s civil society a Muslim aggiornamento.7 On the whole, mature multiculturalist democracy theories, such as Habermas’s or Seyla Benhabib’s,8 are well suited to describe the trajectory of many sections of Europe’s new Muslim minority. There is, however, an important ambivalence in the Habermasian model when applied to the relationship of European majority society to religious Muslims. Even though his model is in principle open to the inclusion of other cultural traditions, Habermas leaves no doubt that there are definitive limits to their inclusion in the European (or any other democratic) framework: ‘integration’, Habermas writes, ‘does not extend to fundamentalist immigrant cultures’ (my emphasis).9 In so far as this simply means that no democratic society can work if some of its members refuse to participate in a dialogue over crucial controversial issues, it may be a necessary and uncontroversial caveat.
The concept of fundamentalism, however, does more work in this context than is initially apparent. A closer look at Habermas’s historical reconstruction of modern society shows that it is central to his dramatic historical narrative of modernization. Philosophically, of course, Habermas’s critique of fundamentalism derives from Kant’s critique of religious orthodoxy, understood as the rationally unjustifiable foreclosure of critical inquiry and debate. But Habermas explicitly ties this philosophical critique to the Durkheimian model of the historical transition from traditional to modern society. In Postmetaphysical Thinking, for instance, he argues that the totalizing metaphysical world-views of traditional society (where religious orthodoxies apparently held sway) disintegrated in the complexities of modern society and gave way to ‘decentralized’ modern world-views.10 These decentralized world-views became, in turn, the precondition for the emergence of civil society and, eventually, democracy and republican citizenship. It is obvious, then, that in this scheme the charge of fundamentalism carries a political denunciation that could hardly be more serious. It marks the addressee as categorically incompatible with membership in democratic society. And yet, fundamentalism remains here largely an abstraction. In not only the Habermasian œuvre but also in much public commentary, it does not (or does only superficially) derive from the critical analysis of actual Muslim concerns and social projects, but emerges as the theoretical backdrop against which the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ and its emancipatory potential can be elaborated.
This problematic conception of fundamentalism is tied to another ambivalence in Habermas’s republican model of democratic citizenship: the distinction between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘political’. Habermas is arguably over-sanguine about the ease with which a shared political culture can be shorn of particular cultural traditions, given that this includes a whole legacy of political values and historical narratives that have shaped the understanding of democracy and indeed politics itself. His own genealogy of democratic society is a case in point. For many religious Muslims in Europe and elsewhere, the reconstruction of their ‘arrival’ in modern (and now increasingly liberal democratic) society differs from mainstream European narratives. Crucially, their narratives hinge not on the rejection of revealed religion and orthodoxy but on a continuing reinterpretation of their place in society. In my own work on contemporary Turkish Islam and its transformation since the 1960s, I am continually struck by the growing openness and attraction to democratic and pluralist notions of society in many Muslim cemaats, and at the same time by their continuing commitment to an orthodox (in the eyes of their secularist critics: fundamentalist) understanding of Islam.11 What we have here is an apparent paradox. There seems to be an increasing convergence between many religious Muslims’ attitude toward democracy and civil society and those dominant in European publics. And yet this does not mean that religious Muslims in fact understand this Muslim aggiornamento in terms easily reconcilable with the historical narrative so central to Habermas’s conception of republican citizenship. This is not to dismiss the model of republican citizenship as such, but simply to point out that new cultural traditions may not quite as easily be incorporated into European political culture(s) as Habermas seems to suggest.
It is no doubt legitimate when Habermas and others ‘draw a line’ between what they see as admissible and what for them is beyond the pale of democratic society. To make ‘fundamentalism’ the dominant term in the public debate, however, is unhelpful. It suggests that we know in principle all that needs to be known about religious Muslims in Europe, in the absence of any real engagement with the concerns and aspirations of communities that have often come to embrace democratic society along different historical trajectories. It becomes crassly tendentious when, as for instance in André Glucksmann’s commentary on the cartoon affair, the apparent modernity–tradition hiatus between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ is the excuse for a verbosely self-satisfied secularism caught up as much in dubious metaphysical certainties as the discourse of any Muslim ‘fundamentalist’.12
Undoubtedly, the encounter of European societies with their increasingly self-confident Muslim minorities is beset with serious conflicts and hard processes of adjustment. As the controversy over the Danish cartoons highlights, what makes this process of integration particularly difficult and unwieldy is that it takes place amidst two powerful and often converging claims that the Islamic tradition and liberal democratic society are mutually exclusive. The wholesale condemnation of Denmark or the West by sections of the Muslim movement shows that Islam can provide powerful ammunition in polarizing the debate. But so do European discourses that use distorted representations of Islam as the foil against a bogus ‘European culture’. For those on the Left, the challenge is not to be drawn into these false oppositions.
Amid the current excitement it should be remembered that the frictions that today accompany the process of integrating religious Muslims into European society are by no means without precedent. What is European history other than a long and arduous process of integrating diverse ethnic groups, countless waves of migrants, political projects and religious traditions? It is a history as ripe with successes as with ongoing tensions and, let us not forget, with ugly and sometimes genocidal policies against demonized minorities. Much would be won if rather than seeing in the encounter of Europe with Muslim communities a clash of civilizations or a confrontation with Europe’s own less enlightened past, we could see it simply as a new chapter in the European history of integrating new social projects. Raymond Williams developed the model of a society in which different social projects – most importantly those of the bourgeoisie and the working class, but also a number of residual and emerging projects – competed with one another for hegemony. The cast in the current drama may have changed. Perhaps it is now Habermas’s republican notion of society that is solidly entrenched as the dominant social project in Europe, while Christianity, socialism, neoliberalism and, of course, numerous nationalist movements compete as secondary, perhaps residual, projects partially incorporated into the overall republican framework. Muslim movements are not yet part of this hegemonic configuration, and what is currently at stake is whether they will be in the future.
Read the full article
In a remarkable reformulation of his original concept of communicative action, Habermas’s writing on multiculturalism makes the inclusion of the cultural ‘other’ central to the project of democratic society.4 Given the globalizing tendencies inherent in modern society, he argues, contemporary democracies can no longer define criteria of belonging in terms of ethnicity or cultural homogeneity.5 In these inevitably plural societies, criteria for citizenship must be tied to the acceptance of a political framework, defined by the constitution, rather than by the prerogatives of majority culture. In this reorientation from the culturally defined nation-state to a ‘republican’ state, Habermas argues, ‘the majority culture must detach itself from its fusion with the general political culture in which all citizens share equally; otherwise it dictates the parameters of political discourses from the outset’.6 The emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II, he suggests, is an example of such a democratic framework. Habermas argues that in the postwar period a patriotic commitment to Germany’s democratic constitution has replaced notions of nationality based on shared ethnic origins or a set of norms and values. In this perspective of constitutional patriotism, the inclusion of other cultural traditions in the national framework is both imperative and possible. Imperative because, in the context of Habermasian discourse ethics, any truth claim that does not open itself to the challenge of all competing claims within a discursive community automatically loses its legitimacy. Possible because once the identity of a political community is detached from a particular cultural tradition, the bond of a shared political culture is strong enough to hold society together. By differentiating the realm of ‘general political culture’ from that of the various cultural traditions from which individual citizens draw their norms and values, Habermas gains a dynamic model of a political community in which the basic rules that govern the community can change over time. This community is shaped not so much in direct negotiations between different cultural traditions but as the result of partially shared, if differently interpreted and discursively mediated, experiences.
Despite the persistent social marginalization that continues to plague many Muslim communities across Europe, and despite occasional acts of violence in the name of Islam, there are clear signs of such a process. José Casanova has called this development that has made Muslim communities and organizations increasingly active players in Europe’s civil society a Muslim aggiornamento.7 On the whole, mature multiculturalist democracy theories, such as Habermas’s or Seyla Benhabib’s,8 are well suited to describe the trajectory of many sections of Europe’s new Muslim minority. There is, however, an important ambivalence in the Habermasian model when applied to the relationship of European majority society to religious Muslims. Even though his model is in principle open to the inclusion of other cultural traditions, Habermas leaves no doubt that there are definitive limits to their inclusion in the European (or any other democratic) framework: ‘integration’, Habermas writes, ‘does not extend to fundamentalist immigrant cultures’ (my emphasis).9 In so far as this simply means that no democratic society can work if some of its members refuse to participate in a dialogue over crucial controversial issues, it may be a necessary and uncontroversial caveat.
The concept of fundamentalism, however, does more work in this context than is initially apparent. A closer look at Habermas’s historical reconstruction of modern society shows that it is central to his dramatic historical narrative of modernization. Philosophically, of course, Habermas’s critique of fundamentalism derives from Kant’s critique of religious orthodoxy, understood as the rationally unjustifiable foreclosure of critical inquiry and debate. But Habermas explicitly ties this philosophical critique to the Durkheimian model of the historical transition from traditional to modern society. In Postmetaphysical Thinking, for instance, he argues that the totalizing metaphysical world-views of traditional society (where religious orthodoxies apparently held sway) disintegrated in the complexities of modern society and gave way to ‘decentralized’ modern world-views.10 These decentralized world-views became, in turn, the precondition for the emergence of civil society and, eventually, democracy and republican citizenship. It is obvious, then, that in this scheme the charge of fundamentalism carries a political denunciation that could hardly be more serious. It marks the addressee as categorically incompatible with membership in democratic society. And yet, fundamentalism remains here largely an abstraction. In not only the Habermasian œuvre but also in much public commentary, it does not (or does only superficially) derive from the critical analysis of actual Muslim concerns and social projects, but emerges as the theoretical backdrop against which the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ and its emancipatory potential can be elaborated.
This problematic conception of fundamentalism is tied to another ambivalence in Habermas’s republican model of democratic citizenship: the distinction between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘political’. Habermas is arguably over-sanguine about the ease with which a shared political culture can be shorn of particular cultural traditions, given that this includes a whole legacy of political values and historical narratives that have shaped the understanding of democracy and indeed politics itself. His own genealogy of democratic society is a case in point. For many religious Muslims in Europe and elsewhere, the reconstruction of their ‘arrival’ in modern (and now increasingly liberal democratic) society differs from mainstream European narratives. Crucially, their narratives hinge not on the rejection of revealed religion and orthodoxy but on a continuing reinterpretation of their place in society. In my own work on contemporary Turkish Islam and its transformation since the 1960s, I am continually struck by the growing openness and attraction to democratic and pluralist notions of society in many Muslim cemaats, and at the same time by their continuing commitment to an orthodox (in the eyes of their secularist critics: fundamentalist) understanding of Islam.11 What we have here is an apparent paradox. There seems to be an increasing convergence between many religious Muslims’ attitude toward democracy and civil society and those dominant in European publics. And yet this does not mean that religious Muslims in fact understand this Muslim aggiornamento in terms easily reconcilable with the historical narrative so central to Habermas’s conception of republican citizenship. This is not to dismiss the model of republican citizenship as such, but simply to point out that new cultural traditions may not quite as easily be incorporated into European political culture(s) as Habermas seems to suggest.
It is no doubt legitimate when Habermas and others ‘draw a line’ between what they see as admissible and what for them is beyond the pale of democratic society. To make ‘fundamentalism’ the dominant term in the public debate, however, is unhelpful. It suggests that we know in principle all that needs to be known about religious Muslims in Europe, in the absence of any real engagement with the concerns and aspirations of communities that have often come to embrace democratic society along different historical trajectories. It becomes crassly tendentious when, as for instance in André Glucksmann’s commentary on the cartoon affair, the apparent modernity–tradition hiatus between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ is the excuse for a verbosely self-satisfied secularism caught up as much in dubious metaphysical certainties as the discourse of any Muslim ‘fundamentalist’.12
Undoubtedly, the encounter of European societies with their increasingly self-confident Muslim minorities is beset with serious conflicts and hard processes of adjustment. As the controversy over the Danish cartoons highlights, what makes this process of integration particularly difficult and unwieldy is that it takes place amidst two powerful and often converging claims that the Islamic tradition and liberal democratic society are mutually exclusive. The wholesale condemnation of Denmark or the West by sections of the Muslim movement shows that Islam can provide powerful ammunition in polarizing the debate. But so do European discourses that use distorted representations of Islam as the foil against a bogus ‘European culture’. For those on the Left, the challenge is not to be drawn into these false oppositions.
Amid the current excitement it should be remembered that the frictions that today accompany the process of integrating religious Muslims into European society are by no means without precedent. What is European history other than a long and arduous process of integrating diverse ethnic groups, countless waves of migrants, political projects and religious traditions? It is a history as ripe with successes as with ongoing tensions and, let us not forget, with ugly and sometimes genocidal policies against demonized minorities. Much would be won if rather than seeing in the encounter of Europe with Muslim communities a clash of civilizations or a confrontation with Europe’s own less enlightened past, we could see it simply as a new chapter in the European history of integrating new social projects. Raymond Williams developed the model of a society in which different social projects – most importantly those of the bourgeoisie and the working class, but also a number of residual and emerging projects – competed with one another for hegemony. The cast in the current drama may have changed. Perhaps it is now Habermas’s republican notion of society that is solidly entrenched as the dominant social project in Europe, while Christianity, socialism, neoliberalism and, of course, numerous nationalist movements compete as secondary, perhaps residual, projects partially incorporated into the overall republican framework. Muslim movements are not yet part of this hegemonic configuration, and what is currently at stake is whether they will be in the future.
Read the full article
Friday, February 9, 2007
Habermas and Theology
Nicholas Adams, Habermas and Theology, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 278pp., $29.99 (pbk), ISBN 0521681146.
Reviewed by Eduardo Mendieta, Stony Brook University
"Adjoining two nouns in the title of a book is like writing a blank check to "cash." One better know who is receiving the check and one better make sure to have sufficient funds when it gets cashed. This book promises too much, and thus delivers too little, but what it delivers is still worth the trouble. The author manages to say some interesting things that may be of use to both philosophers and theologians, notwithstanding the author's avowed claims and disclaimers. The book is vituperative, contrarian, combative, and irreverent. In many ways and on many occasions, the very assumptions of the book are refuted in its execution. The book is a large performative self-contradiction: the form of the enunciated speech act is contradicted by its enactment."
Read the full review
Reviewed by Eduardo Mendieta, Stony Brook University
"Adjoining two nouns in the title of a book is like writing a blank check to "cash." One better know who is receiving the check and one better make sure to have sufficient funds when it gets cashed. This book promises too much, and thus delivers too little, but what it delivers is still worth the trouble. The author manages to say some interesting things that may be of use to both philosophers and theologians, notwithstanding the author's avowed claims and disclaimers. The book is vituperative, contrarian, combative, and irreverent. In many ways and on many occasions, the very assumptions of the book are refuted in its execution. The book is a large performative self-contradiction: the form of the enunciated speech act is contradicted by its enactment."
Read the full review
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Habermas's Critical Theory : Rationality, Reflexivity and Its Limits
Jürgen Habermas, one of the forerunners of critical theory in the second generation of the Frankfurt School, criticizes his seniors, Adorno and Horkheimer that their critique of modernity leads to a cultural pessimism, which blind the "unfulfilled potential of Western Modernity" because of their attachment to the philosophy of consciousness that fails to distinguish between two types of rationalization: instrumental rationality and communicative rationality. (Ray, 1993: 11-12) Habermas believes that modernization and rationalization involves not only purposive rationality but also communicative rationality which is oriented towards consensus that can be the basis of critique and progress.
However, to my impression, it is questionable if Habermas's critical theory is fully critical. To be sure, Habermas's theory has been criticized by many theorists including post-colonial theorists and feminists (interestingly, one of their critical article was titled "What is Critical about Critical Theory?" (Fraser, 1985)). Indeed Habermas's theory tends to attach to western notion of rationality, and neglect so-called "politics of difference" which draws attention to the categories of "the other." This is because Habermas's theory is based on the notion of rationality, which presuppose an agreement or consensus, and rule-following. It looks like a significant departure from the conventional Marxism which emphasizes conflicts between different social factions [classes] to a kind of socio-pathological approach which originated from the Durkheimian tradition and has developed through Parsonsian functionalism. As a result, whereas Habermas's theory has an implicit theory of "communicative reflexivity," he also lacks a significant portion of the notion of reflexivity which is struggling against others or, more importantly, which is both critical and hermeneutic in that while in the given context, it thinks beyond the given contexts. The problem of Habermas's theory of communicative rationality is not only that it neglects the context, but also that it fails to show how to transcend the context in spite of his effort because he fails to see the coexisting another contexts of action; actors does not fully share their contexts. The purpose of this paper is to clarify and reconstruct a Habermasian theory of communicative reflexivity and then to point to its limits.
full here
However, to my impression, it is questionable if Habermas's critical theory is fully critical. To be sure, Habermas's theory has been criticized by many theorists including post-colonial theorists and feminists (interestingly, one of their critical article was titled "What is Critical about Critical Theory?" (Fraser, 1985)). Indeed Habermas's theory tends to attach to western notion of rationality, and neglect so-called "politics of difference" which draws attention to the categories of "the other." This is because Habermas's theory is based on the notion of rationality, which presuppose an agreement or consensus, and rule-following. It looks like a significant departure from the conventional Marxism which emphasizes conflicts between different social factions [classes] to a kind of socio-pathological approach which originated from the Durkheimian tradition and has developed through Parsonsian functionalism. As a result, whereas Habermas's theory has an implicit theory of "communicative reflexivity," he also lacks a significant portion of the notion of reflexivity which is struggling against others or, more importantly, which is both critical and hermeneutic in that while in the given context, it thinks beyond the given contexts. The problem of Habermas's theory of communicative rationality is not only that it neglects the context, but also that it fails to show how to transcend the context in spite of his effort because he fails to see the coexisting another contexts of action; actors does not fully share their contexts. The purpose of this paper is to clarify and reconstruct a Habermasian theory of communicative reflexivity and then to point to its limits.
full here
Habermas and Critical Thinking
Ben Endres
Columbia University
"In this paper, I propose to examine some of the implications of Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics for critical thinking. Since the argument that Habermas presents is complex and multi-dimensional, I will not be able to confront its entirety. Instead, I will briefly summarize the argument and then examine the implications of his standards for reason and communication for education and critical thinking. Critical thinking is also a broad topic with conflicting interpretations. Therefore, I will ground my use of critical thinking in a conception similar to that of Richard Paul's account, which I will also summarize briefly. Given this background, I will argue that Habermas's theory directly confronts the central problem in characterizing critical thinking. The problematic tension in his theory - between the acceptance of profound social differences, and the attempt to ground moral reasoning in universal principles - is also a challenge for critical thinking. Critical thought must be characterized in a way that allows for different subject matter and different methods without sacrificing its usefulness for particular disciplines and diverse learners. I argue that although the requirements that Habermas places on reasoning may need to be broadened to incorporate different kinds of thought, his theory demonstrates the epistemological and ethical need for a general commitment on the part of the thinker to reflect critically on personal and social beliefs."
full here
Columbia University
"In this paper, I propose to examine some of the implications of Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics for critical thinking. Since the argument that Habermas presents is complex and multi-dimensional, I will not be able to confront its entirety. Instead, I will briefly summarize the argument and then examine the implications of his standards for reason and communication for education and critical thinking. Critical thinking is also a broad topic with conflicting interpretations. Therefore, I will ground my use of critical thinking in a conception similar to that of Richard Paul's account, which I will also summarize briefly. Given this background, I will argue that Habermas's theory directly confronts the central problem in characterizing critical thinking. The problematic tension in his theory - between the acceptance of profound social differences, and the attempt to ground moral reasoning in universal principles - is also a challenge for critical thinking. Critical thought must be characterized in a way that allows for different subject matter and different methods without sacrificing its usefulness for particular disciplines and diverse learners. I argue that although the requirements that Habermas places on reasoning may need to be broadened to incorporate different kinds of thought, his theory demonstrates the epistemological and ethical need for a general commitment on the part of the thinker to reflect critically on personal and social beliefs."
full here
Community of difference: Habermas and the problems of pluralism (Juergen Habermas)
Mark Green Thames, The University of Texas at Dallas
Abstract
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist whose thought has moved steadily over the decades to theorize just and moral societies in democratic, constitutional states within a cosmopolitan world order. He attempts to ground all social relations in the human universals of communications. I examine his works in order to show how his theory could be strengthened by jettisoning unnecessary and unhelpful commitments to antimetaphysical and impersonal concepts. I argue that he cannot effectively provide moral-ethical guidance in a situation of worldview pluralism without metaphysical resources. In particular, I argue, first, that his discourse morality in fact implies a universal communicative ethics. Second, his theory of communicative action and his discourse morality together presuppose a certain sort of person as a communicative actor. I compare this with John Searle's conscious self. Third, I think that Habermas inadequately addresses worldview pluralism as a result of these problems and of his commitment to political approaches. This last calls for more comment. The specifics of Habermas's difficulties with pluralism flow from these self-imposed constraints; thus, he fails to find a legitimation for existing metaphysical and religious worldviews, despite his avowed need for them, and so cannot properly welcome their differences; similarly, he fails to acknowledge his own system's implied worldview, and its implied ethical standards for evaluating worldviews, and so struggles to set appropriate boundaries to civil society; moreover, his resulting political-legal approach to developing solidarity and managing difference is unlikely to produce even the broadest sort of cosmopolitan community. I offer John Hick's philosophy of religious pluralism as an example of an alternative approach to problems of worldview pluralism. I hope that a philosophy of communicative action which follows these recommendations will better be able to explain human commonality, ground human community, acknowledge differences, issue needed basic moral-ethical judgments, and affirm personhood and humanity unequivocally. This dissertation is an effort to modify Habermas's philosophy of communicative action accordingly.
Abstract
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist whose thought has moved steadily over the decades to theorize just and moral societies in democratic, constitutional states within a cosmopolitan world order. He attempts to ground all social relations in the human universals of communications. I examine his works in order to show how his theory could be strengthened by jettisoning unnecessary and unhelpful commitments to antimetaphysical and impersonal concepts. I argue that he cannot effectively provide moral-ethical guidance in a situation of worldview pluralism without metaphysical resources. In particular, I argue, first, that his discourse morality in fact implies a universal communicative ethics. Second, his theory of communicative action and his discourse morality together presuppose a certain sort of person as a communicative actor. I compare this with John Searle's conscious self. Third, I think that Habermas inadequately addresses worldview pluralism as a result of these problems and of his commitment to political approaches. This last calls for more comment. The specifics of Habermas's difficulties with pluralism flow from these self-imposed constraints; thus, he fails to find a legitimation for existing metaphysical and religious worldviews, despite his avowed need for them, and so cannot properly welcome their differences; similarly, he fails to acknowledge his own system's implied worldview, and its implied ethical standards for evaluating worldviews, and so struggles to set appropriate boundaries to civil society; moreover, his resulting political-legal approach to developing solidarity and managing difference is unlikely to produce even the broadest sort of cosmopolitan community. I offer John Hick's philosophy of religious pluralism as an example of an alternative approach to problems of worldview pluralism. I hope that a philosophy of communicative action which follows these recommendations will better be able to explain human commonality, ground human community, acknowledge differences, issue needed basic moral-ethical judgments, and affirm personhood and humanity unequivocally. This dissertation is an effort to modify Habermas's philosophy of communicative action accordingly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)