Rick Roderick on Habermas - The Fragile Dignity of Humanity [full length]

[Music] in this lecture I want to discuss one of the most important philosophers who's still working still alive his his work range is over many areas in social theory it ranges in areas of philosophy linguistics so on and that's Jurgen Habermas harbor Maas is one of the last great defenders of rationalism in a period in philosophy in which rationalism zhn OTT held in very high esteem in many ways harbor Maas is an outgrowth of one of the figures that we discussed last time namely Herbert Marcuse a-- and the frogburt school that would include Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer Harbor mots was in fact Adorno's a graduate assistant and so the original project that Jurgen Habermas said himself was to reformulate the kinds of theories being worked on by mark use' by Horkheimer and by Adorno in particular his first venture was to reformulate their distinction between traditional theory understood is both philosophy and science both both as opposed to what they called critical theory a theory whose interest was in the emancipation of human beings now this may sound a little sort of fancy Dan the whole attempt was a way to attempt to reformulate Marxism in a setting appropriate for the late 20th century so this is a very important school of thinkers of which Harbor mosque is in a way the last and leading exponent in assay it's clear I mean especially his later work that he's moved a considerable distance away from Marxism that's that would be obvious like for almost any thinker in the late 20th century what I want to do is to start and move you through in 45 minutes from mark users rather exuberant radicalism his youthful radicalism I want to move from there through Harbor mosses attempt to reformulate that project while keeping in mind our central theme which is the self under siege I mean what was imparted to mark yousa about social systems was not what would be important to the average economist which was you know maximizing utilities what was important to mark use about economies and other things was their effect on the lives of selves how did they cause the self to be able to construct itself in other words how was the economic and cultural impact of that lived out in human beings and I discussed a whole series of pathologies of both the period in which he wrote and that pathologies that have continued down to the present day so that was Marquez's interest was in liberating people from that unnecessary part of life suffering not death you know I mean I think we again I don't think we can get around that but there's a vast difference between living to be 90 and being well-educated and fed and relatively healthy and dying at the age of three weeks in Biafra with flies in your eyes there's a significant difference there a difference that people have found worth fighting over and worth dying for so however most attempts to reformulate this project he begins with a distinction that central throughout his early work between labor and what he initially called interaction but which I think can safely be called by now communication and his argument was a fundamental argument he said if you look at the human species it has fundamental human interests one is to reproduce its life through labor in other words through work that's a fundamental interest of the human species you don't do that one and sort of nothing else gets off the ground it's a fundamental human interest Harbor moths locates a second fundamental human interest and this one is different quite different for him in communication in other words in the in the interest that human beings have and it's a deeply seeded interest in communicating with one another if you think about this it would be required for everything from any kind of social bonding without which even human life in the anthropological sense wouldn't be possible and so on it's a fundamental interest not just in communication this is important but in under started and clear communication that's our fundamental human interest because we have a fundamental human interest in under started communication we need to understand why harbour mouse calls systematically distorted communication and I will be onto that in just a minute first I want to briefly lay aside the part of the older critical theory and of marks that Harbor Maas leaves the loan as he reformulates his project the labor half of the distinction is pretty much left over to the standard economic accounts draw that grow out of his tradition in the early harbor Maas labor is understood as a kind of mana logical or instrumental endeavor you know notice it's an instrumental endeavor driven by the imperatives of efficiency and so on it's an instrumental endeavor and he defines it as being monological now he also says about it something that's sort of banal true he calls it a productive endeavor it's the endeavours surrounding production as opposed to those surrounding communication communication is according to harbor moths by its very nature dialogic okay and what harbor Maas wants to locate because he knows that there are traditional disciplines and throughout the history of Western or India into western into European societies at Western civilization that deal with problems both in the area of labor and communication they say in the area of labor and instrumental reason we have the sciences and in the area of communication we have the humanities which are supposed to enlighten us about dialogue tell us more about how to talk to one another for a harbor Maas we really farm ourselves it selves in both dimensions but we could not for harbor Maas possibly become subjects selves without the communicative dimension of dialogue so he would utterly reject a sort of empiricist account like David Hume would give our like Skinner in the more modern period would give that we could become human simply by looking at patches of blue and listening to pieces of phonetic sounds because for him we become selves in much the way we do for for me the great American sociologist we become selves in turn our interaction with other selves in other words it's by seeing how other people respond to the things that we say that we cue in on who we are we may adjust it and so on I mean this it seems to me at one level an obvious point and this seems to be obviously yeah but you'd be surprised it's not obvious in philosophy now the most controversial part of the early harbor Massa's work is his claim that the human race has a third interest and of course his whole argument will hinge on this and that's the critical interest in a man so patient that the human race really has an interest that's fundamental by that he means an interest that's so important that we needed in order to survive to free ourselves from both the distortions of instrumental reason and the distortions of what could be called and will later in his work be called communicative reason we need to free ourselves from these distortions in other words for the human race survive we need to learn to labor more humanely to the extent that we can manage that and we all but but in the focus of his early work perhaps more important still we need to be able to communicate with one another freely and clearly and that without doing so our chances of a long survival or not great so throughout this work you can see in a way that we have first a reformulation of a kind of mark see inside of the account of human beings in harbor bosses labor part of the distinction now for his communication model we have a what I would call a hermeneutic base for it by hermeneutic here again I mean interpretive and the philosopher he discusses dealt I and others where he says the great art of the humanities if you will the way they further communication is through the interpretation of texts and I'll be talking a lot today about the interpretation of texts because in the humanities when you get right down to it that's what we do let me say it in a simple West X's way we read books we read books we tell our students what they mean you know this is what we do for a living and so don't let hermeneutics throw you because it's a big word it means interpretation of texts now don't think that this is some fancy Dan academic exercise a lot of people have died because they read a book the wrong way I want you to think of the history of the world's great religions one could write a book called the history of heresies and retitle it the history of myths readings that led to death I don't mean to be cynical it's just obvious that reading a book and interpreting a certain way can get you in a lot of trouble similarly those familiar with the law know that just any reading of the Constitution won't work I mean Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion exceptive Rick decides me if I decide I want to start a religion of my own that includes you know slaughtering innocent babies with Archer knives in which case my reading of the Constitution will lead me into deep trouble I can support my reading I mean the Constitution says no law must mean that I'll be literal about it the way that some people are about the Bible I'll go no law means no law so whatever my religion be it baby slicing or whatever but I'm afraid that that that won't be considered a reasonable reading in fact I'm sure of it and don't think that I'm suggesting it as a possible religion to any of you out there in the world of video I'm not so this is the field of interpretation but this is not enough for harbormaster's to have this field of instrumental reason within which Science and Technology and human labor advanced the world technologically and this field of interpretation where humanity advances itself through conversations in an ethical and an aesthetic way there's a third human interest and this is of course crucial to this argument because like Marc Souza and Adorno and Marx and Freud and Nietzsche and all the people we that I've discussed Sartre he has a fundamental interest in human liberation the liberation from unnecessary constraints to our freedom into our full development so he wants to show where that interest lies and and where does it come from well he looks around and he can find only one model and it's unsurprisingly Freud because in a way when you reformulate these things you always sort of seem to fall back on the earlier models in one way or another updated jazzed-up in some way so the model he uses for for our distorted communication that corresponds to what Marx called ideology those remarks that we make that reflect the interests of classes other than the ones we belong to those remarks that we make that are shaped by that truism of Marx to me which is that in every age the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes that to me is just a truism it's not even a theory and I think any fair reading of philosophy will bear it out in every age the ruling ideas are the ideals of the ruling classes and if you read the Nicomachean ethics for Aristotle it has independent interest but basically it's a handbook on how good Athenian gentleman should be good at the knee and gentleman I mean that's still interesting because people today would be probably be better off behaving that way but what the hell it still shows the ruling interests and so on now according to Harbor moss what replaces ideology and his model is what he calls systematically distorted communication he doesn't give many examples this is a really bad habit German philosophers have is to make complex arguments and then not give you a damn example one so you're just lost wondering what is he talking about well I think he has in mind blocks between communication that for example you're having a trade union meeting let's use solidarity for an example I don't tickle people in America even though if we had an organization like solidarity in America wouldn't tickle us but since it's over in Poland I think we can praise it you know trade unions one of the funniest things I ever remember is Reagan praising solidarity and then I thought well I wonder how he'd like a trade union that large in this country with those kind of demands I don't think he would have been praising it but in any case let's let's talk about a dialogue among them and it doesn't have to be other world it could be the kind of dialogue you could have among any trade union as well you know it's a right-to-work state so we don't have a chance well for harbor mas this falls under the mob all he wants of systematically to starting communication because sort of a flat statement it cuts off debate you know and it debate needs to go on moreover it passes that famous test of ideology and that's when you ask yourself if what you believe is in the interest of other people for you to believe it in other words I always suspect the belief if I hold it and I go but you know the very powerful would love for me to believe that maybe I should rethink it because I don't know exactly where all my ideas come from I have an idea of many of them come from the people who control the means and the dissemination of information and communication okay so what he looks for a model where systematically distorted communication is overcome and he finds it in Freud's practice of symptoms of removing symptoms in the situation between an analyst and a patient and in that situation what you get is not an interpretation in other words the patient doesn't say something and then Freud interpret it right the patient just babbles on and on and on and on and on this is not a normal interpretive situation there are a couple of differences unlike trying to read a text it's a situation where the the goal is practical in other words it's to cure the person to make them stop having the symptom so it's got a practical goal interpretation frequently will not another difference that's that is very important for habermas is that Freud succeeded to a certain extent in develop developing a practice that did remove blocks to communication okay you have your patient babbling away sort of the talking cure style of revolution is what we've got going here you have your patient babbling away and the only way you can bring this analysis to a conclusion is when the therapist intervenes presents a possible interpretation but it will not work until what happens both parties agree to it in other words it won't be your analysis until you go yeah I keep biting people because and then you go ah-huh and when you and the therapist agree you have then all the sort of confirmation that your previous behavior and our communication was to started it was to started now that's the model he wants to work with and he thinks we have an interest in removing these distortions to communication for the so that we can have what Sydney Greenstreet says causing The Maltese Falcon clear speaking and plain understanding this is a good this is something civilization needs well this forces into another level of argument of course because if what you want to remove as opposed to ideologies or if what you want to counter or ideologies if instead of that you've really constructed this as systematically to started communication the next question someone may ask you is this what and the devil would under started communication look like in other words now you need some kind of account of communication under started the reason is that our communication is nearly always distorted have you ever noticed after little take a transcription of any conversation and you'll notice there are gaps in it miss spoken words misunderstandings the materiality of language is filled with these anomalies and with these mistakes and I even have to say along the Freudian dimension certain sexual jokes and so on many sort of what you would call distortions of communication appear along other dimensions besides just the dimension that would would reflect on a human labor for example many other dimensions you get to get distortions as well Harbor moss here and this is a bold thing for him to do I want to point this out in the in the late 20th century after all I told you that was going wrong and after what looked like the destruction of reason itself in just you know in a society of subjects that have become kind of humanoids it is quite a valiant thing to try to defend human reason you know in any farm and he does try to do so in this limited form he wants to mark off a sphere of under started communication that could serve as the basis for a concept of what he calls communicative rationality now before we get into that argument I want to explain why he does that other than what I've already said other than the reasons internal to his early work he wants to do it to untangle the employment I talked about last time between enlightened thought and barbaric action that we've seen since the history of modernity in other words we've seen on the one hand people making these individually monological instrumental decisions based on instrumental reason leading to these horrible paradoxes and for harbor mosques the trick is not to give up on modern life it's not to fall beneath the level of civilization reached by capitalism the trick is to disentangle enlightenment from terror mythology and barbarism that clearly we haven't succeeded in doing in the 20th century that's why I spent a lot of time in the first four lectures discussing or some time discussing the experience of fascism and it's the fact on the earlier thinkers we talked because fascism was deep proof that enlightenment and Technology had not led to the liberation of human beings as the great philosophers of the Enlightenment thought it would instead it had led to da Kalin so and this was not its destination this was not what it that the destination that had been hoped for it you know the 19th century believed in progress Adorno once cynically remarked there is no history that leads from slavery to freedom but there is a history that leads from the slingshot to the Megaton bomb so what Harbor Maas wants to do is to try to find a way to disentangle the the more are distorting barbaric aspects of enlightenment from those that we clearly want to hang on to in Harbor mossis opinion there have been advances in modern life and I don't think anybody would dispute this the advances in modern life include one this simple it is much better to have a toothache in 1993 than in 1493 that's simple whenever anyone asks me about this I go well there's one I dread in 1493 a toothache shit's bad you know impacted it's the end of your theoretical work it may be the end of your life you get one now you go to a dentist that's an if that's better not everything that's that modernity has produced has been a disaster obviously I mean this is an obvious point so the trick then is as it were to not throw out the baby with the bathwater and I throw out the advances of modernity when we are in the process of trying to clear up this distorted communication forms and these distortions to people's ways of life okay that's the trick so there's a lot a lot riding on his argument concerning systematically distorted communication well Harbor moss holes and this is rationalists thesis this is the enlightenment part that the that are that the sentences that we utter even from an early age have as it were built into them the desire for consensus for mutual understanding that whether you consciously bring it to mind or not when you speak a sentence it has built into it and if you're following an argument built into it the desire that you be understood by others in other words it has the critical impulse already built into it that impulse that you communicate with that other person if they're from a different class if they're from a different gender you know I mean this is difficult men and women talking different class different race different ethnic group when you utter a sentence Harbor mind sets built into that utterance into that communication as one of its conditions is the desire for unconstrained understanding now you don't when you say pass me the salt bring to mind a desire for universal unconstrained understanding but he thinks it is built into the structure of languages to desire to understand one another the desire to have clear communication he begins to lay out a series of conditions which time will force me to just run through very quickly for such communication one in this of course is what I like to call the Equality provision under started communication would have a symmetry condition truly under started communication would have a symmetry condition like this everyone would have an equal opportunity to talk and listen everyone would have an equal opportunity to talk and to listen let me try to explain why this is more politically interesting than it sounds it means everyone has an equal right to command as to Oh bye that's a speech act that's a communicative act means everyone has an equal right to question and to an answer this symmetry condition has more political power than it seems at first it is a very Galit aryan principle harbor Maas believes that we couldn't have under started communication without it now give again he doesn't but I'll try to give examples to make it understandable I know as a teacher that it's an important condition but it's impossible to achieve in a classroom under these current social conditions because I have the power to grade a child and give him an F and keep him out of Law School even if his rich daddy sends me 500 letters because I have that power I can't expect that student and I to communicate and understood why because our communication is distorted by my power to judge what the student says this is what the people who run operations bosses seldom get the undistorted truth about their situation I also think being a husband that it's why husbands seldom get the truth about the relationship they have with their wives and their sons their daughters and so on because when you're in a relative position of power the other person is aware of it too and of their role and you cannot expect an under started communication one not and I again don't mean personally but systematically to started this is systematically the started it's just started by relations of unequal power in if you're to be communicative right a communicative Lea rational everyone has to have the same right to speak and be heard I also need to give you a real world example of that and that would be something like the great early meetings of solidarity I mean like vilasa recognized people but anybody could stick their hand up union member or not that was when they crossed the line into a total revolution and Lakeville esse sure he was recognizing people but everyone had a right to do that and it wasn't always him either even though that was what was presented in our media and that is while not perfect and we're not expecting the world ever to be perfect neither is harbor Maas this is a model of communication that is what you would call dialogic your dialoguing now you're not monologuing you may notice that this is based on a quite ancient idea it's a Socratic ideal when Socrates argues with an interlocutor he never pulls the argument that well I'm more powerful than you so you're wrong as a matter of fact one of the charms of Socrates is that he owns almost nothing and has almost no position and the only force he expects you to recognize is the force that harbours Maas says is the only force a free human being can ever recognize and that is that peculiar strange unforced force of the better argument Harbor Maas believes that much in rationality that we can change our minds if we hear a better argument and a free person can do that without being ashamed of himself or herself you know if you're in a free and equal situation of communication and someone convinces you through a better argument you go well I now believe differently but not through distortion or anything but through just that strange force that a person feels when they become convinced to go gee now I agree with that that is the force that a free human can recognize according to harbor Maas okay another condition and these these are obvious conditions that awry I mean obvious they can each one can be disputed and I will discuss philosophy later today who just speak everything I'm saying now but I want to present Harbor mosses since I is one of my main areas I want to present his position as powerfully as I can Harbor Mars also thinks that in various dimensions we try to communicate in certain ways for example while we do occasionally lie it belongs to harbor monster the structure of say instrumental reason in the sciences that when we contribute to a discussion on that topic about what's in the world what entities there are and how they behave that we try to make our contribution to the conversation one that is true now this is the sort of linguistically formulation of a Conte and postulate but no I mean in a way it's a piece of good advice I mean if I was to say I you know how should you talk well try to be relevant there's a relevant to the relevancy conditional you know built into speech this is how I mean how this hover must get some of this from grass and I'm adding a little as I go along make your make your contribution to the conversation relevant so if you're electrolysis trade union meeting don't start discussing Harrison Ford's latest performance compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger it's not relevant so try to be relevant true try to try to make your contribution one that is true doesn't mean you will but try to try to make one that's true are another condition built into this I what harbor monsters now call but begun to call the ideal speech situation the ideal speech situation well why ideal well because he realizes this is an idealization that human beings won't be able to fully carry this out but to the extent that we can we will be engaging in communicative in communicative reason try to be relevant to try to make your contribution one that's true and see and this is obvious to me to try to make your contribution one that's sincere when I think about that I always think about an article written in philosophy that is a brilliant article that would be praised by all my colleagues but it ended with the sentence oh by the way I'm only joking in a way that one sentence would undo the whole article I mean would be like no matter how good the article someone would go well what a what a joke this is a classic no the idea here is that when you contribute to what's called a reason conversation that we expect humans expect the contribution to be a sincere contribution and now let's see the final one is a moral condition and that's that we expect that you try to make your contributions to language ones that advance the cause of what is right now there's no Theory here of right other than the ones that you've just heard in the communication theory itself be wrong to be insincere it would be wrong to you know lie it would be wrong to violate the symmetry condition it would be wrong and so well in fact this is a quite 10 moral theory but come to think of it when we tell our children look you ought to do this what stands behind our art is something implicit in language namely that our children can depend on us you know sincerely telling them a moral truth this is what before you earlier when I said we don't learn moral theories from philosophers I didn't mean in this sense IRA must is talking about because we do it learn it in this sense however must means that when mothers tell their children or fathers don't lie they mean it they it's not it's not the started they mean don't lie or don't whatever this is this is the ethical as it were dimension of language now he doesn't want us to confuse these various spheres they all interplay in language for harbor moss and this is a tradition that goes back to Kahn these each represent different practical areas science morality art and even religion all represent different values fears each one will have certain conditions that will be much more important in it than in others in the scientific sphere truth conditions will be most important in the ethical sphere the conditions for what we ought to call rightness or how one ought to behave will be most important in the aesthetic sphere sincerity conditions cyber monsters are important mainly because he wants everything to fit I'm not sure that's true about beauty or not I'm not sure we want the beautiful to also our communication about it maybe shouldn't even be sincere but these things need to fit this is a German theory that needs to fit okay well it looks like we've replaced Marx now by ignoring the economy which wouldn't wouldn't please any of the coal miners in West Virginia tried to replace it as a way of understanding ourselves in the world and we have traded in the class struggle which Marx took to be the the driving force of history for Freud's talking cure well there's some obvious criticisms raised by Young Turks like myself in the early phase of this work namely that the class struggle is not a psychoanalyst is writ large the reason it's not is because workers have every reason to believe that their bosses are not prepared to engage in a process of under started communication with them now patient may believe about his analyst or her analyst that they're prepared to especially at those rights as Freud once said if you don't pay you don't get better but if those rights and those rights you know you can expect some sincerity and some give-and-take but we have no reason to believe the class struggle is a kind of psychoanalysis writ large or that the struggle human beings over ethnicity are of the struggle of women to find dignity and equality is some kind of and the analytic process writ large harbor mas is aware of these objections and responds to them in several ways the one that bothers him the most is the following that his model is elitist his model of communicative reason which I have counterpose to all these pathologies to which it is addressed when I mentioned all those pathologies that the young people are no high oven you know a know me in other words meaninglessness and anxiety dread so on you mention all of those well those are all systemic distortions of communication that come out in the way they talk and interact and the theory is addressed at those but here's the problem it's not just that this doesn't reconstruct Marxism which is of little interest if it's not a true and interesting theory of the present age the deeper problem is that it looks like an elitist theory it looks like a theory that trades Marx's analysis of society as a giant factory for an analysis by Hamas of society as a giant seminar room have you noticed how all these conditions are the ones that ought to hold in a seminar everybody in a seminar should be relevant concise sincere and make their contributions true and it's not lost on any of our Mises critics that he spent his whole adult life as a professor so this is that now I don't want to just stomp on him with one of these West Texas out of hominem arguments here Hodder Maas responds in a way quite living Lee to this objection he says you have missed the point because what I'm talking about in communicative rationality is a process of enlightenment that includes all janitors cooks everybody includes us it includes everyone so we've missed its universality but more importantly and I think this is a beautiful quotation from harbor moths he says in a process of enlightenment there can only be participants no analyst and patient so in that way the model was misleading originally no lek vilasa and the lad no Clinton and the Clintonian 's no Ross Perot and united we stand America in a true process of enlightenment there can only be participants now that stated that way harbor mas is communication Theory looks like a linguistic variant of anarchism and I like it because it means that everybody gets a chance to talk I enjoy that so now let me in the time remaining to me here let me move a little further along to how he's reformulated the theory and he's had to under the force of various objections and they've come from all kinds of people I gave you the Marxist style objections but hermeneutic are interpretive people in the humanities didn't like his account of the humanities as limited either in other words they didn't like that account is it limited to a single interest because they pointed out something that's come up in here several times and that's that the sciences are also interpretive and they went look the work of interpretation isn't just for us humanists but everybody interprets I mean it was Galileo that said that the world was like this giant text in mathematics was its language well that the analogy of the world is a text is one that's very familiar to scientists to read as it were in interpret is not something that's limited to books alone interpretation in fact maybe one of the fundamental conditions for selfhood one of the problems in the current situation with what i have called previously information overload and complexity may be the difficulty that gives us an interpreting everyday life situations because everyone whether they know it or not is always already an interpreter when you stop at a stop sign you've interpreted something already now you've done that without too much interpretive work read in our country means not only commie it also means stop you know I mean red means commie to me commie anarchist hippie type scum but it also when it's a lot means stop acts of interpretation going constantly all around us in all forms of conversation there's that as it were in our encounter with the world itself we see some smoke down the road we have to interpret is it a rack do I need to go another way people have lived together a long time and think they know each other well or still constant interpreters my wife I will see a certain look on my face and it isn't it's interpreted and and I don't think correctly but it she just goes and then we're off on something you know but I mean this shows the ubiquity of interpretation and human life I mean in a certain way one of the characteristics of what the self is and one of the reasons it's under siege is we're interpretive beings and now by the late 20th century we're in a situation where interpretation has never been more difficult never been more difficult one can I mean I can name artifacts that we've developed technologically that are almost completely closed to interpretation in our name one although we attempt to interpret it television television tries to interpret itself to us by passing the upper brain functions and directly feeding into our minds this is why I said off-camera between classes that our wall was it was a pied optimist 1984 arrived in sort of the early 70s and and an R was vision of a horrible future which was a boot stomping on a human face forever is a utopian image because he assumed there would be resistance and human faces both of which may turn out to be false so I mean 1984 is not a book that scares me anymore I mean it's again I know that last time I outrageously said that that Herbert marchesa was the norman vincent peale of the 60s and now this time I've been forced to say that rwal was an optimist you know sort of my corollary to his little cautionary tale well in the face of all this I think that the the tribute I want to pay to harbor Maas and what interested it what interested me about harbor Massa's work was to try to defend reason in spite of all of these things that I've said you may notice that I gave an account of cynical reason but I didn't give you an account of what I might stand VESA Viet and I've said a lot of cynical things well what I admire harbor Maas is the attempt without being a complete idiot to try to develop an account of reason that is runs against cynical reason it does say to us we can speak to one another we can have processes of enlightenment we can learn learn to say what is true to one another now it is true that this is endangered in ways that he didn't discuss in his early work which he doesn't his lighter his later work especially a very large book called theory theories of communicative action Harbor moss once again returns to the attempt of defending this idea of communicative reason and he adds he adds many more problems to it first he recognizes something that I've already pointed out which I think he always recognized but he way again in typically German intellectual fashion he needed time to write four thousand page book on it when I'm in my book when I gave an account of his book I did it in 31 pages and people said well that's too short and I went no his is too long but he realizes by the time of his mature work that money and power as abstract systems to start our everyday life in the ways we talk and that those systems will have to be as it were harmonized before we'll be in a position within which it will really be possible to speak to one another face-to-face and I hate to be quasi theological but perhaps if we could do that then we wouldn't see through a glass darkly you know maybe maybe then we would have a way to find our way out of this dilemma which I have called this terrible int of enlightenment and terror barbarism and myth and if nothing else Harbor mosses project offers this one powerful voice that that argues that such a possibility exists and so for that if nothing else I think he deserves a lot of credit thank you very much that's Harbor moss in a nutshell very shortly thank you

Channel: The Partially Examined Life

Views: 128,978

Keywords: Rick, Roderick, Jurgen, Habermas, philosopher, philosophy

Id: itGtf3ZSkyQ

Length: 47min 34sec (2854 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2012