All Annotations of Jurgen Habermas - Mitchell Stephens[Preview]

saved bytony curzon price on 2006-08-26

• "I think that a certain form of unrestrained communication
  brings to the fore the deepest force of reason, which enables us to overcome
  egocentric or ethnocentric perspectives and reach an expanded . . . view."
  • on 2006-08-26 Tonycurzonprice
    unrestrained communication has a magical, group-making quality
• "Habermas believes human social life
  rests on our capacity to have more or less clear communication with each other."
  We communicate -- to paraphrase Descartes -- therefore our society exists.
• In our "communicative actions," the right sees selfish individuals
  struggling to get a leg up on each other; the postmodern left sees the powerful
  exploiting the powerless; but Habermas sees, of all things, a kind of cooperation.
  Indeed, he shares with Socrates an almost utopian belief in the wholesomeness
  of debate and discussion.

• The Enlightenment, you
  see, left open a crucial question: How does reason -- at whose behest so much
  has been challenged -- justify itself? Reason has undercut our belief in the
  spiritual, in the traditional. What is to prevent reason from challenging reason?
  Why, in other words, should we believe in reason? In "communicative action,"
  Habermas thinks he has come up with an answer.

  
  

  Reason, he maintains,
  is crucial to clear communication. So, to oversimplify a little, if we believe
  in the importance of the universal human impulse to communicate, we have to
  believe in reason. The Enlightenment, Habermas concludes, continues to have
  "a sound core."

  
  

• "I have always been mystified
  by the attention that Habermas receives," Fish says. "His way of thinking about
  these matters seems to me to be obviously faulty. The only way I can explain
  it to myself is that Habermas represents something that a lot of people would
  like to buy into: He seems to offer a way out of corrosive relativism."

• So the battle lines have
  been drawn. Habermas, says Martin Jay, a history professor at UC Berkeley, is
  "a bulwark against some of the more problematic strains in postmodern thought."
  Habermas' book "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" defends modernism
  against the prefix that presumes to outdate it and criticizes various postmodern
  demigods -- including Foucault and Mr. Deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. Rather
  than going beyond modernism, he argues, some of them have just wandered off
  on some of its more "negative" and "empty" byways.