Jrgen Habermas

1
Jürgen Habermas

• Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action
• (1983)

2
Biography

• Born in Düsseldorf in 1929
• Graduated from Bonn, began education at Frankfurt
• Studied under Horkheimer and Adorno
• Left Frankfurt because of ideological differences

3
Objection to Current Social science

• Hermeneutics is NOT a methodology
• Gadamers hermeneutics intended to shed light on
  the common processes of beholding and
  understanding art and history
• Truth and Method, not Truth as Method

4
What Is Hermeneutics, then?

• Hermeneutics as an activity is at best an art
  but never a method as far as science is
  concerned, hermeneutics is a subversive force
  that undermines all systematic approaches.
• - Habermas, pg. 369

5
Two modes of language use

• Scientific
• Observation of event and descriptive analysis
• what is or is not the case
• Hermeneutic
• Understandable objectification of meaning
• A process of active communication, real or
  imagined

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The Limitations Of Hermeneutics

• Interpreters relinquish superiority over their
  subject
• Interpreter must suppress his own preconception
  of the world in order to be objective
• Interpreter has to deal with more than the truth
  value of statement

7
The Art of interpretation

• The interpreter understands the meaning of a text
  insofar as he understands why an author put forth
  his proposition
• The act of interpreting an art requires artistic
  action
• In every work of genius we recognize our own
  rejected thoughts they come back to us with a
  certain alienated majesty. Great works of art
  have no more affecting lesson for us than this.