Abstract
In this article I explore some points of convergence between Habermas and Derrida that revolve around the intersection of ethical and epistemological issues in dialogue. After some preliminary remarks on how dialogue and language are viewed by Habermas and Derrida as standpoints for departing from the philosophy of consciousness and from logocentric metaphysics, I cite the main points of a classroom dialogue in order to illustrate the way in which the ideas of Habermas and Derrida are sometimes received as well as the actual relevance of ethical and epistemic concerns within educational settings. I claim that such concerns cannot be sidestepped without cost and that they can be approached by combining rather than rigidly separating Habermas and Derrida. Beyond the consolidated polemics, emancipatory politics and Enlightenment priorities of truth and justice bring Habermasian reconstruction and Derridean deconstruction closer than it is typically assumed. Attention to such a convergence can enrich the teaching material of higher education courses which usually comprises either Habermasian or Derridean texts but rarely both. It can also stave off some of the risks involved in some versions of constructivism as they occur in school practice.
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Notes
Walzer criticises political theories that rely on constructed or designed conversations. Instead, he puts the case for real talks that do not abstract from actual conditions.
The full length of the discussion, the details and the more everyday or peripheral information cannot be included here for reasons of space and focus.
‘Language is always actually or potentially enmeshed in dialogue’. ‘Even monologue, to the extent it is concerned with getting things right […] is an internal dialogue’ (Blake et al. 1998, p. 30).
In a parallel, yet not dissociated, educational development, ‘while criticisms of abstract rationality are not groundless the term abstract rationality has been used far too widely and at times has amounted almost to a critique of reason itself, where for instance it has been used to apply to any form of reasoning that goes beyond context and suggests universal remit’ (Derry 2008, p. 50).
The well-known debate of the Derrida and Habermas has not helped in the opposite direction, that is, in exploring possible convergences, and their more recent intervention through their co-signed manifesto for Europe has not attracted much educational attention.
Much unlike positivism’s declaration of its commitment to disinterested reason, the meta-narratives of the eighteenth century assumed a ‘reason that takes up a partisan position’. In the conflict between critique and dogmatism, reason had an interest in critique, and reflection included the emancipatory task of demystification. In this way, the cognitive and the voluntary elements were not in opposition.
Consider here how this chimes with a tendency in education which, although it comes from a non-behaviourist context, it opens space for the sway of contextualist conditioning and skill-oriented effectiveness. ‘The absence of any consideration of the inferential character of concepts in Piagetian pedagogy and the influence of this absence on constructivism, has fostered the idea that an individual learner left to his/her own devices in a rich environment will ‘create’ knowledge. However the design of such an environment requires more careful attention to detail than is often realised. Indeed it is often the case that the idea that the learning environment requires design at all is ignored’ (Derry 2008, p. 60). But this only leads to a crude empiricism of know-how to take over, since the absence of guidance sets off accumulated experience and a glorified sense of practice as mechanisms for knowledge acquisition.
And, ‘more discourse means more contradiction and difference. The more abstract the agreements become, the more diverse the disagreements with which we can nonviolently live’ (p. 140).
‘To refuse to see in it ‘an ego in this sense is, within the ethical order, the very gesture of all violence’ (ibid, p. 25).
Compare here Derry’s educational perspective stated as follows: ‘Our cognitive powers clearly distinguish us from animals and machines yet many accounts of our relation to the world fail to make the distinction or if they do make it fail to develop it sufficiently. Indeed as has been mentioned here the social nature of the human mind has generally been approached in education studies in terms of a multiplicity of forms of thought tied to context and mediational means rather than in terms of an examination of what is distinctively and universally human about its character’. (2008, p. 55).
Both contest a new space in the public sphere of liberal societies by attacking exclusion (although Derrida focused more on textual and Habermas on participatory-institutional exclusions), come up with cogent arguments against traditional dualisms, and relate to Kantian ethics in very complex, subtle, and multidimensional ways that are beyond the confines of this article.
For a more critical approach to the political issues surrounding Habermasian ideas see Papastephanou (2010).
This is because ‘there is no natural possibility of isolating the constraints of reality that make a statement true from the semantic rules that lay down these truth conditions’ (ibid).
Gradually, and following independent paths, the two philosophers came closer, in a rapprochement that ultimately took the form of a cosigned manifesto for Europe responding to a practical concern of justice, democracy and futurity: the prospect for an empowered ‘core’ Europe ‘constructed upon shared Enlightenment values to act as a European vanguard which could forge an EU capable of acting as a global player and opposing American aggression in Iraq’ (Rumford 2007, p. 170). That joined effort has in some respects been seen as infelicitous or even Eurocentric. Yet, this is far beyond the scope of the present essay.
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Papastephanou, M. Crossing the Divide Within Continental Philosophy: Reconstruction, Deconstruction, Dialogue and Education. Stud Philos Educ 31, 153–170 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9274-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9274-3