Blog 578 Difference

 In Continental Philosophy there is a contemporary stream of mainly French philosophers: Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Rorty (American), and Habermas (German), who exercise a radical criticism of old philosophy.

 A big issue for them is ‘difference’, between people, perspectives, meanings, interpretations, and these philosophers militate against all structures of science, language, politics, that level individuals off, and are inevitably authoritarian and suppressive. The NAZI regime and the failure of communism reverberate, but the system of capitalism is also debilitating and suppressive. While they also reject the structure offered by Marxism, they maintain its endeavour to lift up the downtrodden.

 This stream of philosophy is suspicious of old Enlightenment ideals of reason. Habermas, however, maintains an ideal of rational discourse. He militates against the obsession with difference in poststructuralism, and argues for similarity and commonality in discourse. He upheld his view of ‘communicative interaction’. That was already to be found in Hegel. Social interaction is relatively neglected in later poststructuralism. Genuine communication should connect with the ‘lifeworld’ of the people , making ‘sense’ to them, in ‘communicative interaction’ that should be free of authoritarian imposition (‘Herrschaftsfrei’; Habermas, 1982). Especially In government communication, this is virtually impossible.  

 But my objection to Habermas is that there can be similarity without identity, with communication building on what is similar and profiting from what is different, with what in earlier items of this blog I called ‘cognitive distance’, and ‘crossing’ it. Without difference, communication would lose its dynamics, its innovativeness.