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January 17, 2006
I've had little connectivity these last few days.
So another quote from the paper by Nikolas Kompridis entitled Heidegger's Challenge and the Future of Critical Theory that I came across on the sidebar of Habermas Reflections. Kompridis says of Heidegger' s account of world disclosure:
In his later philosophy, Heidegger's account of world disclosure takes a "linguistic turn" -- or, rather, makes this turn in an ontological rather than in a semantic-logical direction. Breaking with the conception of language in Being and Time, where language (Rede) opens up or uncovers in a different light something which has already been disclosed independently of language (through concerned involvement with what we encounter in the world), the later Heidegger attributes to language a "primordial" (ürsprunglich) world-disclosing function. It is language which first discloses the horizons of meaning in terms of which we make sense of ourselves and the world. Although the notion of linguistic world disclosure has been traced back to Herder's and Humboldt's theories of language, and is certainly implicit in Nietzsche, the challenge contained in this notion is first formulated in its most original and radical terms by Heidegger. Heidegger not only lingustifies disclosure, he historicizes it as well, making possible accounts of the formation and transformation of historical epochs by tracking changes in ontologies (changes in the "understanding of being").
The idea that language discloses the horizons of meaning in terms of which we make sense of ourselves and the world is rather appealing and useful.
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"Both...are offering paradigms of intersubjectivity, but they each focus on different binding media: Heidegger focuses on semantic media...:Habermas on justificatory media.... At the center of Heidegger's paradigm of intersubjectivity is the semantic and ontological notion of world disclosure; at the center of Habermas' is the epistemic and moral notion of non-local justification. A second and crucial difference concerns their respective construals of the relation between intersubjectivity and the availability of an objective world shared in common. Whereas for Habermas the world is opened up through relations of intersubjectivity, for Heidegger the relations of intersubjectivity presuppose rather than bring about an objective world shared in common."
I think that citation gets at the crux of the matter, and I, for one would not want to fully endorse either perspective. Heidegger's account not only fails to address the role of relations to others qua other in the very emergence and formation of anything like a "subject" or human being, but his emphasis of the priority of objective truth, (which is a kind of spiritualistic obverse of the preocuppations of positivist scientism), links up with what I said earlier about the latent functionalism in his work, (which is one of the deeper sources of what links him to the other fellow-travellers on the German right.) And the whole conception of "Being", as a kind of autonomized super-objectivity not only carries with it the dubious air of a huge over-generalization, but it strike me as the last stand of the traditional philosophical spiritual-aristocratic stance: absolute truth would have to carry the paradox within it that it contains its own falsehood, "errancy". The upshot is that the "objective" ontological priority of the "Truth of Being" becomes a fatal dispensation that must be submitted to,- Being is, therefore it is a commandment,- while ethics and the socio-political world are merely a consequence, like the pop-up pictures that appear when one opens a pop-up book. Adequate discrimination and differentiations between spheres and issues are self-obstructed by such a scheme.
Habermas, on the other hand, has always struck me as if he'd never read Wittgenstein, which, of course, he has. But the force of W.'s critical dissolution of epistemology seems somewhat lost on him. At any rate, even if he did leave his earlier claims for a social epistemology behind with his own linguistic turn, his construction of a linguistic-communicative intersubjectivity has always struck me as too much in pre-established harmony with the very prior conceptions of subjectivity and reflective consciousness and agency that he claims to overcome. (Yes, there's a residue of German Idealism there: not everything can be rendered "transparently" into rational discourse without remainder, nor can abstractive discourse be readily reintegrated into concrete social life, without losing its distinctive status and the power-differentials it either gives rise or becomes enmeshed in.) His overriding concern for the securement of agreement for epistemic and political-moral reasons leads him to abstract from the real conflicts and ambiguities that remain beneath the surface of his elaborate theoretical structure, while his overly cognitivist and highly individualist superliberalism leaves me at a loss to understand its practical modalities and organizational potentials. Most of all, he tends to give short shrift to the necessary background, the "form of life", that we are all embedded in and embody, which limits and constrains our "universal" claims, even as it is what renders them possible, in the first place. (Note the aporia: anything that becomes problematic and contested in communicative interaction in the life-world becomes subject to resolution through discourse, which removes it from the unquestioned background resources of the life-world, but the unquestioned background resources of the life-world are what we draw upon in understanding what is at issue.) The very aim for a "completion" of the undistorted project of modernity, abstracted from any historical teleology, not only blunts some of the critical force and light to be cast on the problems and conflicts of modernity, while maintaining that very teleology in its absence in the mode of running in place, but it exercizes a somewhat conservative restraint on the very renovations and innovations that would be needed to arrive at an other, second modernity.