[FRA:] [Adorno-Hegel] Something about Kant from ND

[matthew piscioneri]

I think Habermas's statements of this sort need to be understood with at least 1/2 an eye on his role as a "public" intellectual...a great deal of his work IMO should be understood as "situated" or "practical" discourse...in other words, its a form of discourse praxis. It's one of the great attractions of Habermas's work. Indeed, and without wanting to stretch things TOO far, I sometimes think Habermas (and safely from within the guise of the 'last great rationalist') utilizes a typical PoMO strategy of discursive flexibility to push specific practical objectives. 

Too often we pigeon hole thinkers into slots that refer more to the pop interests of the academic publishing industry...snappy dust cover tropes that seduce us into intellectual false consciousness. In the late 1960s, Habermas identified a niche in the then current discursive ecology and occupied it somewhat effortlessly. But, to overlook the almost playful manipulation of an extraordinarily wide range of theoretical positions (from Popper to Austin, for example) is to underestimate Habermas's fundamental commitment to pragmatism and the core/original CT intention of developing a critical theory of society, informed by science with practical intent. 


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> Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:37:46 -0400
> From: jamesrovira at gmail.com
> To: theory-frankfurt-school at srcf.ucam.org
> Subject: Re: [FRA:] [Adorno-Hegel] Something about Kant from ND
> 
> I think Habermas credits postmodernism with too much originality.
> There's significant overlap between postmodern hermeneutics and, say,
> Medieval hermeneutics -- really, Catholic hermeneutics up to Luther,
> in their assumptions about the text, its authority, etc.
> "Christianity" is too big a word to be meaningfully used as Habermas
> seems to be using it.
> 
> But I'm not sure what Habermas means by "Christianity" in that
> quotation.  You might be able to argue that the ethical systems (and
> to some extent, the metaphysics) of German Idealists were strongly
> informed by -German Protestantism- (probably what Habermas means by
> "Christianity"), but that's not saying much.  Hegel knew that but
> believed he was taking the next step -- so religion is picture
> thinking and philosophy leads to the truth.  Of course we'd expect a
> similarity of patterns between the two, but there's no question what's
> being privileged and what's being left behind, either.  In this view
> "Christianity" has a place in an evolutionary narrative, but like
> everything in every evolutionary narrative it's to be left behind.
> Does this make Hegel a Christian?  Or Marx?  Or Adorno?  Hegel's
> narrative seems to me to have much more in common with hermeticism or
> panentheism than with Christianity in the end.
> 
> The only persons to really reject Christianity -- to not give it any
> place -- seems to me to be Nietzsche and Stirner.
> 
> Adorno, if I recall, expressed a great deal of hostility toward
> Kierkegaard's Christianity in his book Kierkegaard, but at the same
> time seemed to prefer Benjamin's Jewish inflected writings more than
> his communist writings -- he at least seemed to find them more
> interesting.  The Jargon of Authenticity seems to be harsher toward
> Heideggerian existentialism than religion as well.  These ambivalences
> could be nothing more than differentiating the bad from the worse,
> though, but I haven't quite worked it out yet.
> 
> Jim R
> 
> On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Lev Lafayette
> <lev_lafayette at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> > I'm not sure of that specific quote but there is the rather notorious remarks of 2004:
> >
> > "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
> >
> > (cf., http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=347)
> >
> > Personally, I think Habermas' uhhh, "epistemological turn" occurred with the publication of The Future of Human Nature in 2003.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> >
> >
> > Lev
> 
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