Abstract
Forchtner moves from describing claims to know the lessons from the past towards considering their evaluation and normative aspects. Instead of discussing how claims to know position subjects, this chapter thus turns to the notion of learning from the past. What would a notion of learning in line with narrative theory look like? How could it be linked to the four rhetorics? And what are the theoretical foundations on which it could be justified? He draws on the Habermasian notion of intersubjectivity and the concept of collective learning processes, i.e. processes through which intersubjective relations become more open and egalitarian. These approaches are then revised by including narrative theory, in particular the aforementioned modes of emplotment which he understands as social mechanisms rather enabling or blocking collective learning processes.
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Notes
- 1.
This sharp separation is not entirely convincing as Margalit (2002, p. 182) himself talks about the moral witness as ‘systematically ambiguous between ethics and morality’.
- 2.
- 3.
There is a basic division between non-social action oriented towards success (actor-object) and social action (actor-actor). Social action is then further divided into either strategic action or action oriented towards understanding, i.e. communicative action. The latter has been further differentiated (Habermas, 2003).
- 4.
Another criticism concerns the fact that arguments cannot last forever—a point to which Habermas (1990b, p. 92) responds by arguing for institutional measures which ‘sufficiently neutralise empirical limitations and avoidable internal and external interference so that the idealised conditions pragmatically presupposed by participants in argumentation can at least be adequately approximated’.
- 5.
Consider also Foucault’s comment concerning polemics in Sect. 3.2.
- 6.
In this context, I avoid discussing Glynos’ subsequent turn to Lacan’s ethics of the drive.
- 7.
Although I cannot develop this here, let me include a further quote from Derrida (1996, p. 84) on the messianic structure belonging to all language use (and bearing a certain resemblance to the above outlined reconstruction): ‘There is no language without the performative dimension of the promise, the minute I open my mouth I am in the promise. Even if I say that “I don’t believe in truth” or whatever, the minute I open my mouth there is a “believe me” at work. Even when I lie, and perhaps especially when I lie, there is a “believe me” in play. And this “I promise you that I am speaking the truth” is a messianic apriori, a promise which, even if it is not kept, even if one knows that it cannot be kept, takes place and qua promise is messianic’.
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Forchtner, B. (2016). Narrating Lessons and Collective Learning Processes. In: Lessons from the Past?. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48322-5_7
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