In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

44 Beyond Objectivism and Relativism they highlight, and especially the nature and role of reason as it pertains to praxis. POLITICAL JUDGMENT AND PRACTICAL DISCOURSE The issues that come into prominence in the differing emphases of Gadamer and Habermas open us to a much broader dimension in the new conversation about human rationality. My purpose in introducing the "Gadamer-Habermas debate" is to emphasize the more general way in which the analysis of praxis, phronesis, practical discourse, and political judgment (all of which are intimately related) has entered this new conversation. The critiques of the varieties of scienticism, positivism, behaviorism, and methodism are shared by a much larger group of thinkers who have sought in different ways to recover the meaning of praxis and to show its relevance to contemporary society. These have been major themes in the work of Hannah Arendt, whose investigation of the human condition focuses on the vita activa, with the threefold distinction of labor, work, and action (praxis).77 She too warns us about the current danger of forgetting what action or praxis really is-the highest form of human activity, manifested in speech and deed and rooted in the human condition of plurality. She also argues that in the modern age a fabricating or means-end mentality (techne) and a laboring mentality have distorted and corrupted praxis. Her analysis of the public space of appearance in the polis has many parallels with Habermas's analysis of communicative action that is oriented toward mutual understanding.78 Some dimensions of her analysis of political judgment have an affinity with Gadamer's own analysis of phronesis and judgment.79 But the common ground that is shared by Arendt, Gadamer, and Habermas enables us to appreciate the sharp and consequential differences among them in their reflections on the meaning and role of praxis in the contemporary world. We find similar motifs in a variety of other political thinkers including Charles Taylor, Hanna Pitkin, and Sheldon Wolin.80 Consider, for example, Sheldon Wolin's essay, "Political Theory as a Vocation./I When we compare this essay with the writings of Gadamer and Feyerabend, structural similarities leap to view. All three examine and criticize the modern obsession with Method. All three trace this back to the Cartesian legacy. Feyerabend's attack on Method is directed against what he takes to be the invidious consequences that the obsession with Method has had for the understanding of the 45 An Overview natural sciences. Gadamer is constantly battling against the intrusion of method into hermeneutics and the Geisteswissenschaften. Wolin seeks to show how "methodism" has infected and distorted the discipline of political science. Method is not innocent or neutral. It not only presupposes an understanding of what constitutes social and political life; it has become a powerful factor in shaping (or rather misshaping) human life in the modern world. Wolin makes fully explicit the practical-moral concern that lies at the heart of the writings of Feyerabend and Gadamer when he tells us that the vita methodi "avoids fundamental criticism and fundamental commitment/' and that far from being an innocent, epistemological, neutral ideal it is a "proposal for shaping the mind"-a proposal that all three see as having ominous consequences.Bl Against the vita methodi, Wolin defends the bios theoretikos, and at the heart of his understanding of this form of life is judgment. The following passage by Wolin might have been written by Gadamer, for it approximates Gadamer's own understanding of the quintessence of political judgment . What is political wisdom? Put in this vague form, the question is unanswerable , but it may be reformulated so as to be fruitful. The antithesis between political wisdom and political science basically concerns two different forms of knowledge. The scientific form represents the search for rigorous formulations which are logically consistent and empirically testable. As a form, it has the qualities of compactness, manipulability, and relative independence of context. Political wisdom is an unfortunate phrase, for ... the question is not what it is but in what does it inhere. History, knowledge of institutions, and legal analysis [are relevant] ... knowledge of past political theories might also be added. Taken as a whole, this composite type of knowledge presents a contrast with the scientific type. Its mode of activity is not so much the style of the search as of reflection. It is mindful of logic, but more so of the incoherence and contradictoriness of experience. And for the same reason, it is distrustful of rigor...

Share