Jurgen Habermas reached this conclusion at the end of his book Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action: Morality and Ethical Life that in face of moral and practical issues "The historical and social sciences can be of greater help in this endeavour than philosophy. [and what we need to do is to construct a materialist theory of society] pp. 211" What universalistic moral theory cannot do is make any kind of substantive contribution. This is only one part of the problem. It only establishes the fact that philosophical argumentations if we understand it as just a bundle of discourses and presuppositions that get at the most fundamental of things (analysis of a priori conditions) is insufficient. It is not the solution to problems in social life (emphasis given to 'in'). It tells me my analyses must go further to make any effective, perceivable, objectifiable change in society. So what if “I” (as the intellectual who entrusts herself with the task to understand the ontology of society and the individual) know this is ‘truth’ and this is ‘right?’ if all philosophical understanding is only in my mind and at best, communicable only to the capable ones of my intellectual community? If the fabric of social life is in the ‘intersubjective’ communicative practice of everyday life, where all forms of recognition, argumentation, consensus can actually and possibly occur in real time social interaction, then there really is a formidable problem that you posed to me and that Searle was trying to himself solve. That there exists ‘volitional gaps (Searle, Rationality in action pp. 50)’ between deliberation (intention) and action; transcendental and empirical; the a priori-ness of philosophy and the materialist contextual real time sociology. Do you now understand why I think I think I am either the most imperceptive otherwise the moronic? Because all I have done is, to perambulate in a huge circle trying to find proofs and deductions just to realize that the layman knows more than I do, that the answer lies in social life, in effecting changes, in communicative action, in interaction and not only in philosophical construing.
But it cannot be that philosophy is all pointless. The universalist-transcendental discourse is still important for man as Marx and all Greek philosophers in ancient times have already established, man is more than animals. We are not just brutes, automatons, or bees. We are architects, we think, we construe, we deliberate, we contemplate, we intend and most importantly, we rationalize. As such, all post Kantian theories and thought must delineate between ideas of reason and concepts or possibility, as opposed to simply brute actuality-reality, immediately objectifiable, perceptible and intuitive. I cannot verify empirically that that Kantian transcendental philosophy is important. I can go through painstakingly and most meticulously of the logical steps in argumentation, you and I know that it grounds the autonomy and primacy of the individual, the 'subject' (discounting the fact that some arguments are not well augmented by Kant). Habermas can, philosophers can, thinkers can, you and I can know that society in this day and age must necessarily be grounded in a "universal principle" Habermas calls the 'U':
That "all affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation (Habermas, moral consciousness and communicative action pp. 66.)" - or in other words, there exists an ultimate basis for justification or the a most fundamental basis (justification can be proven only by pragmatic transcendental argumentation pp. 93) - that prior to the possibility of modern social life, there needs to be the most fundamental moral principle that all man must be able to raise claims, live the life that he wants to live, raise and question assertions, partake in discourse, express his or her attitudes and desires (Habermas, moral consciousness and communicative action pp. 89).
But , recount the great problem of the gap, the fact that the intellectual knows this and has proven this as the fundamental moral maxim of all social life, but how can we make the lay understand this? How can the gap between the intellectual’s transcendental argumentation and intentionality be assimilated into social life? How can transcendental arguments be used in sociology? Sociology that gives these universalistic presumptions its parallel correlate – its materialist context, its substantive context, its substantive claim and therefore gives it its humane form, its life?
What I think is this. My conclusions are neither nouveau nor original. But we live in a society that as Durkheim has concluded is ‘organic.’ Weber too as Adam Smith has said it albeit in a more economic context that we now have many spheres of life. As a social scientist who seeks to document and theorize about social life, the most first and most overt empirical observation must be this:
(1) that what is indubitable, incontrovertible and most apparent is that modern society is manifesting a proliferation of lifestyles, attitudes, values. It is ‘cracked up’ and ‘broken’ into many pieces, many spheres. It is no longer characterized by similitude. It is not a coincidence why Anthony Giddens wrote his paper on ‘Democracy’ or why Weber has theorized about the manifold spheres of life. This observation is therefore, not new. (but we fail to give it recognition)
And recall that man is not brute. We use language, we have propositional truths, we live in a realm of ideas, values and concepts that govern our actions. If so, then the second and most overt empirical observation must be this:
(2) that the progress of indispensable transcendental universalist values and maxims (or even attitudes) or more precisely put, the adoption of new fundamental values have failed to commensurate at the pace in which real time modern society has transformed into – a proliferation of lifestyles, life spheres, values, likings, dispositions, attitudes.
As such, the third most overt empirical observation is this:
(3) that because of this failed commensuration, certain life forms and types are unwittingly and unintentionally discredited, dismissed, and carelessly labeled as anomalous, aberrant, deviant, abnormal and sub-par.
As such, any analytical theory must admit the presumption that:
(1) The current state of society post-structural. Any structuralist analysis is now, antediluvian. Any structuralist analysis of society that begins or holds a quintessence as ‘normative’ or ‘normatively valid’ is necessarily detrimental to the state of social sciences because is essentially playing amnesia to our empirical observation (3) and hence, it fails to recognize the most obvious overt and immediate empirical observation and intuition of social life. That it is now diverse, manifold and has many infinitely possible permutations, variations of all forms and types that the social sciences may not be able to accurately and totally document and theorize about.
If we admit this presumption (1), then we must also reach this conclusion that:
(1) it is necessary for the happiness of all man (assuming the primacy of the subject) that there needs to be commensuration between the real time actual progression and transformation of society and value maxims needed to support the happiness and contentment of all man if we assume the end of life is happiness. This value-maxim must be inclusive of all man and hence, all possible forms of life that exist and will continually exist as shown in proposition (1). So this value-maxim cannot be something that is particularistic because it must ground the life of all. This value-maxim must hence be universal and what is universal if we make prior reference to Habermas, is cannot be empirically proven but must be presupposed for any empirical possibilities and thus, is transcendental. This transcendental maxim is the ‘U’ that Habermas has laboured on in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action.
, I think this is important because if we do not want to and can no longer rely on religious, traditional grounds that I think are all to be subsumed under ‘structuralism,’ – that admits only a selective group and excludes others, or simply by nonargument, vacuous and incongruous to every individual or asserting that assuming that things are “because they just are,” then there needs to be a new ground and all encompassing value maxim. This value maxim is Habermas’s universal ‘U’ which takes into consideration all man and all possible interactions and permutations of the forms of life. This is important because of the change in the whole dynamics of society as shown in empirical observation (1). Habermas writes here: “… the responsibility for suicide can never be attributed to the individual alone. This seemingly lonelinest deeds actually enacts a fate for which others collectively must take some of the blame, the fate of ostracism from an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. (pp. 200)” This very much parallels Durkheim’s anomie and both shows need to adopt a universal value maxim in modern society is important because, the fabric social life is in the real time, intersubjective world, in interaction and in perhaps, living. But if structuralism persists, if the ‘U’ and rationality is not the one universal maxim value that replaces current day modern life, then there will be persisting neglect of ‘other’ real communities in society. It is not coincidental that minority groups such as the ‘gay’ community is facing cognitive-psychological problems such as depression, schizophrenia, colossal amounts of self-denial and reproach; that suicide rates are much higher in these communities. It boils down to a very fundamental problem, the fissure and incommensurability of social life and value-moral maxims.
The question then is this: “how can we close this gap?” and the only solution I think exists is through social interaction, through public action, through communicative action for what there is in social life, is social life, it is only through interaction that the volitional gaps that Searle writes on can be closed. It is only through argumentation and discourse. Do you see why I am feel miserable and idiotic? How is it that I can even possibly miss the most obvious point?
Lifeworld structures are becoming more differentiated and individuals are becoming more individuated and if as Habermas writes that some basic undeniable facts are such as that we are “creatures individuated only through socialization [and] are vulnerable and morally in need of considerateness, (pp. 199),” that we are constituted by our lifeworld, by participating in interpersonal life, language, interaction, then if the life world does not engage in every individual and norms and values do not permit the validitation of many ‘other’ individual personal lifestyles, then indeed, “the subject [will be] unable to form the inner center that is his personal identity (pp. 199)” thereby threatening this integrity of life and personal rights to live as a human being. Because it is undeniable that all man is “constituted as individuals by growing into an intersubjectively shared life world,” if there come a situation whereby man cannot and is unable to participate in intersubjectivity, existentially, he is killed. His life, has ended. He is pronounced dead by his own lifeworld or society.
If we want to dwell a little bit deeper and ask “how is man constituted into his intersubjective world?” Then the answer lies in language and concepts as Searle, one amongst the many writes. Why? Because as mentioned afore, man is not brute. He is like what Marx says, an ‘architect’ in his mind with ideas and concepts. Society is constituted not only by ‘brute facts’ but in fact and also constituted by an infinite span of ‘institutional facts,’ facts that are ‘made possible’ by language, symbols and human recognition (Searle, mind language and society pp. 154). I thought this basic understanding of this Searlean ontology of society important and so adumbrated it in a separate postscript paper. But what I think I derived from it is this: that if society, the intersubjective and lifeworld is constituted by language and concepts, if society is made up of an infinite multiplier of “X counts as Y in context C” and if what our current state of society endorses is only a structuralist-exclusive attitude which systematically and unwittingly sacrifices other life forms, then such a society I conclude, is (a) pre-Kantian and pre-Enlightenment – this society has failed to adopt a rational (or in Habermasian terms a “hypothetical attitude”) in social interactions and arguments in the intersubjective world and is thus (b) pathological in terms the failure of society to reach a new equilibrium between its current developmental state - overt empirical hypothesis (1) and in adoption of a universal rational value maxim.
I think , my own philosophical and social inquiries have made me more real by virtue of the very fact that, I realized that the intellectual, if he takes up this role, this ethic of responsibility, cannot devolve himself from and of the responsibility of answering practical and ethical enquiries. What is a good life? What is a good society? What must we do? I ask myself everyday, how should I proceed?
If ‘concepts’ that exist in our society existentially kills ‘many others’ in society, what can I as the intellectual do? Can my Habermasian, Kantian, Foucauldian, Searlean analysis of the situation help? I believe, only to a very small extent because the rest of it, lies in interactive communication, active change and practical actions in social life where things happen. I know, I can set down to prove and think of what is important, this is the task I entrust myself now. What can be done? How should it be done? More importantly, what is the role of communicative action, public institutions and actions?
I have entrusted myself the task amongst other things to read in greater depth some of the more core works of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action again in both volumes since I have sometime before I meet you this coming Thursday.
Some days I think it is of my greatest misery that I find no solution yet and that all my analysis, and thinking only opens more doors to the incongruity, vacuity, disjunctions and tensions in philosophy and the social sciences, in the mind and intentionality and action, in the public and political sphere and intellectual sphere, in transcendental philosophy and the empirical ones. It is even sadder when I realized that I have missed the simplest most obvious point that real social life exists in action and interaction. I have all my thanks to these dead thinkers Marx and Habermas to slap me awake.
But you know, everyday, I proudly tell myself even though I am recently ashamed by this that, here I am, I can be no other.
My questions never end. How? What? Why? What is the role of the intellectual?
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Birth of the Ego of a woman
I Prelude to an Exordium of a new vindication of womanhood 25.3.2011
When we talk about the man, there is a strong sense of an I. All literature and intellectual writings evoke the “he” as if only “he” has a consciousness to act freely. Mary Wollstonecroft wrote in when women were denied education, the rights to vote and Rousseau’s Emile thought women should never feel herself independent of man and be educated differently to a life of subservience to man. In the letter to M Talleyrand Perigord the late Bishop of Autun, she questions, who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason? In her discussion of a sexual character, she asks, If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? Why should man think woman need their protection and all the women should care about is her beauty, thinness and subservience and nothing else? In the traditional philosophical language, all woman are phallus-negations and chimerical appearances. All women are signifieds of the signifier and as Lacan writes, “paradoxical as this formulation might seem, it is in order to be the phallus, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her feminity.” The discursive reality of being a woman is that there is no originary signifiying economy of a woman, no symbolic order of a woman, no materiality of a woman, no meaning of what is to be an Asian woman if not to be the deferential, composed, biddable, pleasant, good-natured and desired-object of man. The becoming of a woman is to realize that there is nothing we can become and are therefore predisposed to a far more treacherous route we are impelled to take because first, we have to create a substance to become before we can become and act. Woman are beset by their privation and lack by birth. The categorical imperative of a woman is a continual to be disposed to, without dispositions, to be displaced of her libido and to seek permanent residence in a deathless negation, a non-place. Women must thrust this phallic order into anarchism and resist it if she is to be woman.
This resistance is formidable one more than ever before because now, the scaffold to be overcome is a discursive construction that is made more invisible than ever. The cultural industry to evoke the meanings of the term used by Adorno has created the greatest pretense claiming that the highest principle of all synthetic judgments, the highest synthetic a priori judgment is the accession to beauty but not free consciousness, passivity but not will and eschewal but not synthesis. To resist is then to resist against these a priori categorical imperatives and to create new principles of pure understanding. As the great philosopher Kant augments, “The a priori conditions of intuition are absolutely necessary conditions of any possible experience [CPR pp. 196].” We have to set limits to the sensibility of the phallic economy, curb its pretensions and not let it extend its stronghold still unproblematically. This preexisting phallic “I,” we have to establish as a syllogistic transcendental paralogism that is as Kant writes the concludes its real being from the transcendental concept of the subject which contains nothing manifold, the absolute unity of this subject itself. We have to show that the man’s substantiality is a paralogism that is without any real substratum. “The proposition, ‘The [phallic] soul is substance’, may, however, quite well be allowed to stand if only it be recognized that this concept [of the soul as substance] does not carry us a single step further [CPR pp. 334]” and thereby cannot prove its sturdiness and deathlessness. The permanence of man is a concept that signifies its nounemal substance only in idea and not in reality. That such constructs “does not carry us any further” and properly should not, is because such constructs are not meant to be ossified and objectified but meant to be in its state of ad infinitum possibilities of constant active construction and this principle is to be the right of every equal human being. Instead of the aversion to tension, we need to learn to embrace the state of flux and tension as a pleasurable beauty and all that exhorts us to fixity must have an ideological mastermind behind it of which we must be very careful of.
In concreto, this task is a formidable one because all notions of good are congealed with the attributes of the biddable and to breakaway from this is equally formidable for there is nothing in the a priori perceptual structures of woman that is amenable to her becoming and her becoming will always be criticized by the ideology of practicality that there is no practical meaning of wanting to become, that it is futile and pointless to want to become for they evoke the circularity of the argument propounding to us that it what is good is being congenial and sympathetic to a cause different from ours. Therefore, they appeal to us to live an incomplete existence as if it were a complete one. The internal possibility of being a noumenal woman is impossible, yet. To proceed is to venture into grounds unchartered before, being amenable to stigmatization and pillory and the misery of alienation. To proceed is to begin to evoke the “I” as mine and at the end of it, to recognize that this “I” is mine and not the property of others. It is to create a symbolic economy that affirms the legion of multifarious views of a woman as actually existing, regardless. I therefore urge that all woman should do this and make this the primary task in their lives for the better lives of other woman who may want to become, but cannot be, I show them, we can be.
Woman must overcome her fear of evoking the “I” to tell of her opinions and the purpose of this excursus is as such. It is inception of the affirmation of her experiences.
When we talk about the man, there is a strong sense of an I. All literature and intellectual writings evoke the “he” as if only “he” has a consciousness to act freely. Mary Wollstonecroft wrote in when women were denied education, the rights to vote and Rousseau’s Emile thought women should never feel herself independent of man and be educated differently to a life of subservience to man. In the letter to M Talleyrand Perigord the late Bishop of Autun, she questions, who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason? In her discussion of a sexual character, she asks, If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? Why should man think woman need their protection and all the women should care about is her beauty, thinness and subservience and nothing else? In the traditional philosophical language, all woman are phallus-negations and chimerical appearances. All women are signifieds of the signifier and as Lacan writes, “paradoxical as this formulation might seem, it is in order to be the phallus, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her feminity.” The discursive reality of being a woman is that there is no originary signifiying economy of a woman, no symbolic order of a woman, no materiality of a woman, no meaning of what is to be an Asian woman if not to be the deferential, composed, biddable, pleasant, good-natured and desired-object of man. The becoming of a woman is to realize that there is nothing we can become and are therefore predisposed to a far more treacherous route we are impelled to take because first, we have to create a substance to become before we can become and act. Woman are beset by their privation and lack by birth. The categorical imperative of a woman is a continual to be disposed to, without dispositions, to be displaced of her libido and to seek permanent residence in a deathless negation, a non-place. Women must thrust this phallic order into anarchism and resist it if she is to be woman.
This resistance is formidable one more than ever before because now, the scaffold to be overcome is a discursive construction that is made more invisible than ever. The cultural industry to evoke the meanings of the term used by Adorno has created the greatest pretense claiming that the highest principle of all synthetic judgments, the highest synthetic a priori judgment is the accession to beauty but not free consciousness, passivity but not will and eschewal but not synthesis. To resist is then to resist against these a priori categorical imperatives and to create new principles of pure understanding. As the great philosopher Kant augments, “The a priori conditions of intuition are absolutely necessary conditions of any possible experience [CPR pp. 196].” We have to set limits to the sensibility of the phallic economy, curb its pretensions and not let it extend its stronghold still unproblematically. This preexisting phallic “I,” we have to establish as a syllogistic transcendental paralogism that is as Kant writes the concludes its real being from the transcendental concept of the subject which contains nothing manifold, the absolute unity of this subject itself. We have to show that the man’s substantiality is a paralogism that is without any real substratum. “The proposition, ‘The [phallic] soul is substance’, may, however, quite well be allowed to stand if only it be recognized that this concept [of the soul as substance] does not carry us a single step further [CPR pp. 334]” and thereby cannot prove its sturdiness and deathlessness. The permanence of man is a concept that signifies its nounemal substance only in idea and not in reality. That such constructs “does not carry us any further” and properly should not, is because such constructs are not meant to be ossified and objectified but meant to be in its state of ad infinitum possibilities of constant active construction and this principle is to be the right of every equal human being. Instead of the aversion to tension, we need to learn to embrace the state of flux and tension as a pleasurable beauty and all that exhorts us to fixity must have an ideological mastermind behind it of which we must be very careful of.
In concreto, this task is a formidable one because all notions of good are congealed with the attributes of the biddable and to breakaway from this is equally formidable for there is nothing in the a priori perceptual structures of woman that is amenable to her becoming and her becoming will always be criticized by the ideology of practicality that there is no practical meaning of wanting to become, that it is futile and pointless to want to become for they evoke the circularity of the argument propounding to us that it what is good is being congenial and sympathetic to a cause different from ours. Therefore, they appeal to us to live an incomplete existence as if it were a complete one. The internal possibility of being a noumenal woman is impossible, yet. To proceed is to venture into grounds unchartered before, being amenable to stigmatization and pillory and the misery of alienation. To proceed is to begin to evoke the “I” as mine and at the end of it, to recognize that this “I” is mine and not the property of others. It is to create a symbolic economy that affirms the legion of multifarious views of a woman as actually existing, regardless. I therefore urge that all woman should do this and make this the primary task in their lives for the better lives of other woman who may want to become, but cannot be, I show them, we can be.
Woman must overcome her fear of evoking the “I” to tell of her opinions and the purpose of this excursus is as such. It is inception of the affirmation of her experiences.
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