David,
I'm in general agreement with your perspective on Habermas. On the
positive
side his work shows just how important an understanding of
ontogenesis is
for any kind of critical analysis: a critical theory, emancipatory
inquiry,
etc. To put it simply, how people act now depends not only on their
current
circumstances but also on their past experiences, so any sort of
emancipatory effort, whether it is psychotherapy or political
organization,
needs to be able to comprehend the impact of those experiences.
At first Habermas, like Horkheimer and Adorno, turned to Freud for an
account of ontogenesis, specifically an account of the ways traumatic
experiences in childhood lead to distortions in adult
communication. But
this got him into trouble and the kind of approach to ontogenesis
that
Habermas has been drawing on since then has been structuralist:
Piaget for
an account of the ontogenesis of instrumental knowledge, Kohlberg
for moral
knowledge, and Selman for social knowledge. I have respect for
each of
those three, but their work rests on assumptions that I have
trouble with.
For Habermas they offer a kind of rational reconstruction of
ontogenesis
that he believes is able to separate what is contingent from what is
necessary and universal. I am skeptical. They also, as you point out,
downplay what goes on 'below' the level of concepts, and consider the
abstract to be a transcendence of the concrete and actual rather
than a
transformation of it.
It is ironic, and disappointing, that Habermas has never turned his
attention to LSV.
Martin
On Oct 22, 2009, at 9:02 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
Martin and Wolff-Michael:
Thanks for taking the time to patiently explain some Heidegger to a
philosophical neophyte. Wolff-Michael is right when he suspects I
have not
studied it. First of all, my German is nowhere near good enough.
Secondly, I
am Jewish (despite a goyische surname which my maternal
grandmother always
suspected meant "kill hog") and, despite our well known
inclination to take
suffering and even existence rather unsentimentally, I share with
other Jews
a strong disinclination to make our continued existence a topic of
discussion.
But thirdly, my real interest is not Heidegger at all, but Adorno; I
started reading Heidegger only in order to understand Adorno's
consuming
distaste for him. It's Adorno, not I, who says that Heidegger's
view of
language is unmediated. But now I really AM quite interested in
understanding what that means.
I think Adorno does NOT mean that Heidegger's view of language is
unmediated in some ontological sense; that "language is" in the
sense that
"being is" or "death is". It seems to me that what he's arguing is
a lot
more subtle: it's that the statement that "being is" or "death is"
IMPLIES,
although it does not explicitly state, that "language is", because
"being"
and "death" are "given to us" (to use a somewhat unfortunate
Andyism) not by
experience but only by language. That is an argument with which I
think I am
in full agreement.
(The more I read of Adorno the more I find I disagree with him at my
peril, and so like Tony I am quite uneasy about his views on jazz,
which he
considers "slave music". I suppose in a sense he is right, but it
seems to
me that the choice we are then given is a choice between the music
of slaves
and that of slave masters, and I am more than a little surprised
that he
prefers the latter.)
Adorno provides an antidote to Habermas, whose views on psychology
are
almost pure Piagetianism (though Adorno himself is a little two
inclined to
Freudianism for my taste, he uses Freud to great effect in his
critique of
fascist aesthetics.) Habermas' affinity for Piaget means
"communicative
rationality" is basically something laid on top of the other forms
of
rationality, rather the way that formal thinking rises out of
concrete
operations. That leads to a really miserable kind of
ethnocentrism, where
the bit that I am interested in, the part Habermas calls
"evaluative"
rationality involved in aesthetic judgment, gets utterly short
shrift.
On the one hand, Habermas has the problem of explaining how
cultures which
are supposedly lacking in cognitive-instrumental discourses
(teleological
rationality) nevertheless appear to have fully develped forms of
evaluative
discourse (dramaturgical rationality). On the other, Habermas is
left in a
world where Western myths about the "invisible hand" of the market
and the
sovereign individual are considered forms of rationality while
Azande myths
about magic spells and the sovereignty witches are not.
All of this could EASILY have been avoided, if Habermas had just
bothered
to read and take seriously Vygotsky's critique of Levy-Bruhl and
other early
ethnographers and his observation that a lot of what we consider
"adult"
thinking takes place BELOW the level of concepts, and probably
OUGHT to keep
doing so. For example, as a jazz lover, I am quite unwilling to
give up my
musical affinity for concrete and factual links between ideas, and
as a
painter I am positively wedded to them.
All of which renews my appreciation for Chapter Five of Thinking and
Speech, and also Paula and Carol's work on "Wolves and Other
Vygotskyan
Constructs". I started reading their work convinced that Chapter
Six, where
Vygotsky champions "leaving complexes at the school door" and
teaching a
school curriculum entirely aimed at concept development,
represented the
"real" Vygotsky. Now, I am not at all sure; it seems to me that in
the field
of aesthetic education at least Chapter Six represents a
concession to
educational Stakhanovism, a concession far too far.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
PS: Andy, it seems to me that a question we really need to ask is
whether
or not childhood has been made artificially long in so-called modern
societies, all of which suffer from capitalist overproduction and
consequently chronic under-employment. The Michael Jackson
phenomenon, the
peculiarly Western phenomenon of great children's lit written by
pedophiles
(Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, etc) and (most recently) the
obsession with the
"balloon boy" hoax all suggest that in so-called modern societies,
it is not
children who are hurried so much as adults who are retarded,
There's a good article by Suzanne Gaskins on Mayan children who (she
argues) do not actually play, but only engage in various forms of
legitimate
peripheral participation on the fringes of adult activity. She
makes a good
case that this is a perfectly valid way of life, far better suited
to this
environment than what you and I call "childhood".
Gaskins, S. (1999) Children's Daily Lives in a Mayan Village: A
Case Study
of Culturally Constructed Roles and Activities. In Goncu, A.
Children's
Engagement in the World, pp. 25-61. CUP.
d
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