Habermas

Jürgen Habermas

Dialogue and reason can, (and must) be used to solve problems, (like those in the Sudan and in Colombia). Marcus Aurelius wrote about this, he studied Epictetus. Epictetus wrote the first "self hep" book (the Enchiridon), about using reason to solve problems.

"[Habermas] shares with Socrates an almost utopian belief in the wholesomeness of debate and discussion."

"He believes we can reason out solutions to our problems, that just institutions can lead to a fairer society."

After the Habermas quotes, I have some articles about Mayor Mockus who got me interested in Habermas by a televised talk he gave a few years ago.

THE THEOLOGIAN OF TALK;

THE QUESTION IS WHETHER JUSTICE EXISTS AND REASON CAN BENEFIT SOCIETY. IT'S POSTMODERN TO SAY NO, BUT JURGEN HABERMAS, A GERMAN PHILOSOPHER, DISAGREES.

"Habermas has been able to go into discussions in political theory, in sociology, in psychology, in legal theory -- in a dozen different disciplines -- and become one of the dominant voices in each one."

In the academic world nowadays, such range, depth and dominance attract an endless stream of conference invitations. Habermas accepts his share. And sometimes at these conferences, particularly if Americans are in attendance, he'll find himself surrounded by postmodernists. Swords will be raised. The debate will resume. The postmodernists might begin questioning, for example, whether "reason" isn't just the name the powerful give to their rationales for holding power or whether "justice" isn't just an excuse for the majority to impose its morality on the minority. (One such conference was dominated by legal theorists from Harvard Law School.) Habermas, an aficionado of open debate, will fight back, enthusiastically, aggressively.

He believes we can reason out solutions to our problems, that just institutions can lead to a fairer society. And when irony-wielding postmodernists make light of these possibilities, Habermas responds with formidable barrages of scholarship and logic.

Habermas has had a large number of good ideas as he has sailed from one research area to another. But behind his contributions to all these different disciplines there seems to have been one central theme: his theory of "communicative action."

As Seyla Benhabib, a professor of political theory at Harvard, explains: "Habermas believes human social life rests on our capacity to have more or less clear communication with each other." We communicate -- to paraphrase Descartes -- therefore our society exists.

A rather antiquated, idealistic message to be spreading, some might think, in a world of abusive talk-show hosts, misogynistic rap groups and earphone-encased teen-agers. Habermas is, to be sure, as concerned about pop culture as the next philosopher. But he continues to believe that somewhere behind the better of our attempts to communicate with each other, there have to be some shared values, shared respect and acknowledged equality. He sees the participants in conversations, in other words, as playing on the same teams. And as they talk together, Habermas insists, they make an effort to employ reason.

"This may not seem like a big deal," Benhabib acknowledges. "But it has fundamentally changed our way of thinking about society in the last 25 years or so." Habermas' theory, she explains, calls into question a belief that is widely held by cynical and fashionable thinkers on the right and the left: the belief that human behavior should be seen as a battlefield upon which each of us is merely out for our own strategic interests. In our "communicative actions," the right sees selfish individuals struggling to get a leg up on each other; the postmodern left sees the powerful exploiting the powerless; but Habermas sees, of all things, a kind of cooperation. Indeed, he shares with Socrates an almost utopian belief in the wholesomeness of debate and discussion.

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/Habermas%20page.htm

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Mayor Mockus has applied Habermas' ideas in Bogota with success:

The Bogota Experiment

What happens when you elect a mathematics and philosophy professor mayor? You get mimes on the street. And, it turns out, that's a good thing.

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000483.html

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Academic turns city into a social experiment

Mayor Mockus of Bogotá and his spectacularly applied theory By María Cristina Caballero...the Harvard News Office

Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, "a 6.5 million person classroom."

Mockus' seemingly wacky notions have a respectable intellectual pedigree. His measures were informed by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North, who has investigated the tension between formal and informal rules, and Jürgen Habermas' work on how dialogue creates social capital.

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.11/01-mockus.htm

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Habermas claims that communiation is a basic component of society, and that reason is a basic component of communication.

Although Habermas bristled at the presumption that he has had "one great idea," the philosopher is willing, after some meditation, to admit to the existence of a "thread" that runs through his work. This is it: "I think that a certain form of unrestrained communication brings to the fore the deepest force of reason, which enables us to overcome egocentric or ethnocentric perspectives and reach an expanded . . . view."

This thread ties in neatly with the values of the Enlightenment. Those of us who have been out of social studies class for a while may need to be reminded that the Enlightenment was a struggle, which began 200 years ago, in the name of reason, against tyranny, superstition and inequity. Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson saw themselves as involved in that struggle. Habermas has contributed to it, too.

Haberams Article