The primary virtue of that process known as “comprehensives” or “qualification” examinations in North American doctoral programs (in the social sciences and humanities) is that they force you to read things you wouldn’t otherwise bother to read or wouldn’t otherwise consider reading. Habermas is a good example. I’m not particularly interested in reading him and I ordinarily wouldn’t consider it. (There are moments in Structural Transformation, however, that are mildly interesting.) One might say that I am as pre-disposed towards being uncharitable to Habermas as he is pre-disposed to be uncharitable to anything “postmodern” or “poststructuralist”.
While Habermas hates “poststructuralism” and “postmdernism” because, essentially, they are in his eyes “Nietzschean” or “crypto-normative”, I hate Habermas — or, at least, his work — because it is so pedantic and scholastic.
My goal for this afternoon was to read a significant chunk of On the Logic of the Social Sciences; I have, as of yet, made it a full seven pages into the book. Tortuous prose. Infinite digressions into the needlessly obscure. And then, what does he say? Essentially, “Well, really, we didn’t need to do all this. People aren’t neo-Kantians anymore. And, besides, most can’t even spell Rickert’s name.”
Section 1.2, however, begins with a neo-Kantian, viz, Ernst Cassirer. I’m sure it will end in the same way. “No need to have done this. People haven’t ever been and won’t ever be Cassirerian. They likely couldn’t find his books in the library.”
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy digression, detail and the obscure. I don’t, however, appreciate the scholastic pedantry of a pompous liberal who writes in the most turgid of Germanic prose.
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Cassirer is not the worst of 20th Century “liberal” Kantians to read; personally I think he’s quite superior to the likes of Heidegger, and at least as knowledgable in regards to scientific issues, language, culture. I preused his Essay on Man some years ago and found it interesting, though I would agree there is in C’s writing some of that early 20th century pragmatism, futurism, or policy-speak ala Dewey that may irritate a bit, but it’s hardly as nausesating as the vague conceptualism and endless marxist-freudian rehashings of most postmodernist writers.
It’s been a long while since I read Cassirer first hand; that is, without mediation through another thinker. Most recently, of course, Habermas. So, I fully admit that my impression of Cassirer is most likely incorrect… but I wonder about the epistemological flattening his philosophy of symbolic forms leads to: myth, religion, art and science (and, presumably, any other domain you wish to identify) having the same status — i.e., only able to produce ‘true’ statements about themselves — and with philosophy mediating between spheres or acting as a meta-theory… While committed to an epistemological relativism, I just wonder if this is too flat.
Put that way, *I’ll* say!
Let us float, float away…
Ah, deleting now. I am not sure which is more nauseating: lightweight Holboisms via JL Austin and Searle (Holbo being another of these language people who hold that the real answers to political, philosophical and psychological questions reside in grammar books), OR rehashings of marx, kegel or postmods via Long Sunday, or the sort of broad Rorty-like generalisms. Raison: C’est mort.
Bertrand Russell sits in Elysium laughing at all of this, Wittgenstein bringing him tea.
(delete ………now)
If you — or anyone else, for that matter — remains coherent and generally polite, then you — again, or anyone else — remains invited to contribute comments. If your thing is slander, vague accusations, and borderline racist re-workings of people’s last names, then you should find somewhere else to comment. Chabert, for instance, has a stated policy of not deleting comments. Try there.
If you are unable or unwilling to remain moderately civil, then I will have to ask you to leave. Your first comment above on Cassirer is more than acceptable; the comment I deleted, however, is not.
Craig, I’m not sure how far I’d go to defend Habermas, but surely we can find more to complain about then his pedantic, germanic prose? (This is not as bad as me complaining about the price of his books, of course.)
Also, isn’t it a bit odd for him to say we’re not neo-Kantian and then go all Rawlsian in “Between Facts and Norms”?
btw, are you familiar with the Luhmann/Habermas debate? I’ve picked up a bit of Luhmann and hope to read it over the summer along with some Parsons and Schultz & Luckmann’s “The Structures of the Lifeworld”. Thus far I’ve been mostly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebrve. (At some point we should have a talk about these terms like “political” but not now sadly.)
Luke, you are quite right.
First, with respect to your complaint about price: they are expensive because they are primarily sold to a jet-setting elite group of international human rights lawyers being dispatched by the wealthy first world to the third in response to any given humanitarian crisis. If only they’d read about ideal speech acts in Darfur!
Second, you are right that dismissing Habermas on the basis of his prose is not fair. There are certainly better reasons to do so. (I’ll return to them in a couple weeks when I get around to re-reading the appendices to Between Facts and Norms on sovereignty.) I’d point out, in his defense, that Structural Transformation was both interesting and tolerable. And I don’t recall the prose being as tortuous as that found in On the Logic of the Social Sciences.
Third, its worth nothing (re: Rawls) that Habermas largely repudiates his rejection of neo-Kantian epistemology in the English preface to On the Logic of the Social Sciences. I think he remained consistently Kantian in his moral theory throughout. Isn’t Structural Transformation largely an exposition of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”?
I’m not familiar with his battle with Luhmann. I think the beginning of a serious attack on Habermas begins with what is fundamentally an incoherent synthesis in his epistemology: his attempt to combine Schutz’s phenomenology and Garfinkle’s ethnomethodology with Parsons’ structural functionalism. One recalls that Garfinkle intented ethnomethodology as a point-for-point refutation of Parsons. The political critique — system/lifeworld or the procedural (?) democracy in Between Facts and Norms — is likely the more exciting one, though.
I’m not familiar with all the influences you list in your final paragraph. I agree however that Habermas remains Kantian throughout his career (on this see Kenneth Baynes book on Kant, Rawls and Habermas). The publicity issue though is largely superficial; public space in his early work was a precondition of the possibility of democratic ‘steering’ of technology. This can easily be seen in his “Towards a Rational Society.” Instead I think what makes Habermas Kantian is that he collapses theory and practice, or congition and willing, into the single Kantian fact of reason. Undistorted communication allows individuals to recognize their true interests, after which they would rationally act to change the world to meet those interests. The recognition of these interests, like the recognition of a moral truth, is sufficient to motivate action. Only by collapsing these moments can Habermas hope to combine social science with emancipation.
(I’m still thinking this through and I suspect most people would regard it as tendentious reading of both Kant and Habermas… but this is a blog comment, so I’ll indulge is wild speculative reasoning.)
It comes through most clearly in sections of A Theory of Communicative Action that Habermas is, largely, trying to bridge ‘macro-’ and ‘micro-’ sociological explanations while, on the one hand, purging the bad and keeing the good from Parsons and, on the other hand, doing the same thing with Garfinkle’s ethnomethodology. Aside from the incoherent tendencies of this sort of eclecticism, Habermas either completely misses or wilfully omits that ethnomethodology (the American sociological version of phenomenology) was a political program directed at Parsons’ structural functionalism! Essentially, Habermas is trying to do with structural functionalism and ethnomethodology what Nancy Fraser tries to do with Habermas and Foucault — at least what she tried to do in the early eighties. The result is incoherent liberal bullshit!
I’ve wondered: is Habermas the most polemical of recent philosophers? There’s a Habermas/everyone debate. Gadamar, Foucault, Luhmann, … .
Didn’t Habermas think of himself as a Marxist in the Structural Transformation era?
Blogs are for thinking out loud and talking to yourself.
The last question first, as much as Habermas ever considered himself a Marxists, he was in the early 60′s. You can see him grappling with this tradition in some of the essays in “Theory and Practice.” I think – I don’t know what the critical concensus is – that the public sphere was important to Habermas for avoiding the authoritarianism of Leninism. In place of the Leninist pedagogical model of consciousness raising, Habermas proposes a model based on Freud (analyst/analysand) in “Knowledge and Human Interests” before abandoning that as well. (There may be some irony then in calling Habermas a pedant.)
As to the sociology, I am in complete agreement that his appropriation of Parsons is strange considering the critical literature that even I (!) am aware of. Opposing it with a sort of phenomenology does sound painfully eclectic. I wonder if the missing piece here is Systems Theory, which (I suspect) is a German updating of Parsons. Does Luhmann make this marriage more palatable? How does the debate over the methodology of the social sciences affect Habermas’ theoretical and political projects?
I don’t have answers to these questions. I’m just reading Habermas early essays right now. I may tackle Theory of Communicative Action over the summer.
While I have friends who are very much into Luhmann, I’ve never actually opened one of his books. I’m told his prose is Germanic… (On that note, reading Horkheimer and Adorno over the past few days, I’m happy that some Germans aren’t so Germanic.) If you ever come to a conclusion — that Habermas isn’t as incoherent as he appears — I’d love to see it.
Habermas may consider himself a Marxist, who knows, but in honesty, who cares right? Though he may be the most popular social thinker of our time, his best work was “Knowledge and Human Interest” which came out in ’68 interestingly enough. Everything else, has been mostly fuel for the fire in the “postmodern backlash” that plagues the American academy(most especially the social sciences) even today. Try to utter “post-” in a sociology course in the states and, with very few exceptions, you will get shot down and called a “poor scholar.” Luke, you mention “Theory of Communicative Action,” which is quite influential in media studies as well as other fields. Rather disheartening I think because he cannot get off his “public sphere” “colonization of the life-world” “collective rationality” nonsense. Sure, his analysis is mostly agreeable but the politics and conclusions he makes are where most people love him or hate him. I don’t like him too much. I tend to side with those who have disgarded the incomplete “project of modernity,” which to me is a huge farce and could be interpreted as justification for “modernization”(SAPs, IMF, World Bank loans, etc) of the developing world among other things. I think his teachers are rolling in their graves. The ghosts of Adorno and Horkheimer must be rather shocked to see him like this, or maybe they aren’t and they expected it. Either way, I think Habermas became a good sociologist at the cost of being a critical thinker. Functionalism has its merits(Jeffrey Alexander is okay…kinda..)but it’s lodged in a rather weak structural analysis(Lev-Strauss and Barthes did it so much better, see Charles Lemert’s “The uses of French Structuralisms in Sociology” in his Postmodernism is not What you Think for an assesment of American sociological traditions in comparison to the French) which doesn’t do much except just rehash debates re: structure and agent(sociology needs to really get over this, I am speaking as a doctoral student in sociology). Okay, enough ranting.
Doles, it is for the reasons you indicate that I didn’t apply to any American schools for the PhD. It seems that if you want rigorous training in social theory in the English language, you have to go to Canada, England or Australia. (I remained in Canada, clearly.) Are you at Yale with Alexender?
I note, in passing, that Bhaskar, in his essay, “What is Critical Realism?”, collected in Reclaiming Reality, writes, “… the two most important Marxist philosophers sine the mid sixties — Louis Althusser and Jurgen Habermas.”
Craig,
I am actually not at Yale with Alexander. I am right now finishing up my time with Charles Lemert at Wesleyan University, hence my heavy debt to French Theory. Starting this fall, I am going to the City University of New York (CUNY)-Graduate Center to begin my doctoral studies under Patricia T. Clough and Stanley Aronowitz.
Canada, England and Australia are definitely much better places than the States, but it’s hard to make the jump back for employment people say. The Americans love them some Habermas though. I mean it’s kind of sickening.
I’d read Althusser over Habermas any day. If for nothing, there is at least his influence on Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, who are definitely inheritors of an Althusserian anti-humanism. Actually, I don’t mind Claus Offe’s stuff, and he studied with Habermas.
I am still trying to make coherent sense of Lemert’s claim, in his Introduction (“On the Uses and Pleasures of Social Theory”) to his edited Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, that:
1. His own son’s alleged ‘explanation’ of the sex-segregated lines to and in the lunchroom imposed by the ‘traditional’ public school, to the effect that schools are as (if not more) interested in imposing/imparting authority and social order as they are in ‘learning’, was in any way other than by the fiat of the practiced professional social theorist Lemert himself a good enough social theory, at the lay level, a verbalization, a putting-into-words, in a plausibly coherent manner, of the social world of students. Also, how it explained why SEX-segregated as opposed to any other form of ‘irrational’ or ‘arbitrary’ rule.
2. His claim that the single statement by Lafayette (“If I grow up, I want to be a bus-driver”) amounted to a good enough social theory of the world of black, poverty-class, inner-city America, AND was a ‘survival skill’ which allowed Laf. to ‘begin to survive’ and to experience the ‘uncommon pleasure’ of know that one knows what’s there because one is able to say it. And supposedly, that recognizing so is a heroic stance against intellectualism.
3. His notion that when the oppressed CAN speak they, thereby, acquire powerful weapons of struggle, even though they by definition always can speak and always have spoken;
4. His claim that, somehow, all characterizations of them as oppressed, disadvantaged, etc. notwithstanding, the social theories of the oppressed (rooted, allegedly, in the social experiences of those least capable of escaping social disruption) are ‘good enough’ (for whom and for what?) social theories, without (?) being first incorporated into the theories of professional theorists or themselves elevated to the status of ‘good enough social theory’ by someone who is NOT (that) oppressed.
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