Stanley Fish has published a New York Times opinion piece on recent work by Jürgen Habermas titled Does Reason Know What It Is Missing? Habermas is a German philosopher, an atheist, who in Fish’s words,
has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment rationality that has been attacked both by postmodernism, which derides formal reason’s claims of internal coherence and neutrality, and by various fundamentalisms, which subordinate reason to religious imperatives that sweep everything before them
What Habermas has come to recognize, according to Fish, is where secular reason cannot go and what it cannot do.
What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments….
Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.
The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield.
Although in his solution there is still “something missing,” Habermas’s analysis of the problem (as summarized by Fish) is by far the best I’ve seen from any secularist.
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Tom,
There is an interesting article written by two professors in Australia relating Habermas’ works to what they call “practical mysticism”: http://jsw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/2/149
That is what I’ve spent 50 years trying to do and write about in my e-book. It is not just contemplation and meditation. A mystical approach must be applicable to everyday living. It should transform our awareness to a transpersonal outlook on life. For most people there always seems to be something missing. True mystics feel wholeness often and can share it.
At a basic level, the logic concept of recursion provides self-awareness.
Goedel’s Theorem is an example of such awareness in mathematics and formal logic.
Recursion is the basis for all human languages. Many people believe that it is language that makes us self-aware.
Recursion may also be the seat of consciousness itself. The purpose of a brain is to provide a model of an organism’s world. The human brain additionally contains a (recursive) model of itself, thus allowing self-awareness.
Self-awareness differs from “meaning,” which seems to be unavailable to reason because philosophers define it that way.
Saw this article and thought of this post.
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)