The Opinion System: Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas

Three: The Opinion System and the Re-Formation of the Individual (Hobbes, Locke, Mendelssohn, Fichte, and Goethe)

t h r e e The Opinion System and the Re-Formation of the Individual (Hobbes, Locke, Mendelssohn, Fichte, and Goethe) In England just about everyone has his own opinion, but this does not mean that they all have different ones. g e o r g c h r i s t o p h l i c h t e n b e r g , Sudelbuch entry D19 Introduction Before the French Revolution, an ‘‘opinion-system’’—as Lichtenberg called it, and later Fichte, though in a different sense—had been developing in Europe for at least a century. The practical model for the system came from England, where this new ‘‘system’’ was generally viewed—perhaps even more so by those on the continent—as a positive contribution to the intellectual life of nations. The basis of the system was a cosmopolitan milieu, which extended the interest of the reading public to events transpiring beyond the sphere of their own everyday interests and concerns. Despite the enthusiastic participation in the discourses that sprang up, certain reservations and a strong curiosity can also be observed. Lichtenberg’s remark from the middle of the eighteenth century gives a sense of this, but even in 1710, in number 155 of Richard Steele’s The Tatler, under the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, Joseph Addison describes the social function and PAGE 123 123 ................. 16924$ $CH3 08-13-08 08:15:22 PS 124 Opinion and the Re-Formation of the Individual dysfunction of opinion.1 The anecdote is preceded by an epigraph from Horace, ‘‘Aliena Negotia curat / Excussus propriis’’ (‘‘He minds others’ concerns since he has lost his own’’), and tells of an industrious upholsterer who is also a ‘‘newsmonger’’: ‘‘He had a Wife and several Children; but was much more inquisitive to know what passes in Poland than in his own Family , and was in greater Pain and Anxiety of Mind for King Augustus’s Welfare than of his nearest Relations. He looked extremely thin in a Dearth of News.’’2 Thinking globally, the upholsterer loses touch with his local environment and personal responsibilities, and becomes a mere spectator and a expert gossip because he is more concerned with things beyond his control and completely unrelated to the concerns of his own life. The upholsterer represents a new type of gossip in information-addiction, which allows the addict—ear constantly to the ground, eyes on the paper—to behave as an of authority or cryptic oracle: ‘‘He back’d his Assertions with so many broken Hints, and such a Show of Depth and Wisdom, that we gave our selves up to his Opinions.’’3 The privatization of opinion—‘‘everyone has one,’’ as they say—appears as an indirect effect of the growth of a literate public. The public sphere conjured up by private opinions made the common good seem accessible, if only virtually, as a common concern, regardless of its actual relevance to those who perceived it, and despite the fact that they had no authority to do anything about it. Addison’s caricature shows that the opinion system, even in its earliest stages, was prone to a kind of compulsiveness that caused the printed word to become the object of a constant doubling and distortion in its oral appropriations and interpretations. The latter may have occurred as rational-critical reflections or as mere gossip, but they were, in either case, highly persuasive because the appearance of worldliness could be intersubjectively produced and reproduced according to a logic that was representational more than strictly rational. Knowledge was thus the next best thing to control, and it allowed for the appearance of control, which translated into actual control in many social settings. The ability to represent an understanding of current events allowed a qualified mastery of them to be rhetorically asserted, even and especially by those who were barely in control of their own lives. Addison’s skepticism thus appears at the moment when disinterested spectatorship—of precisely the kind Kant would theorize in his Conflict of the Faculties—and sheer curiosity threaten to dissolve the social fabric and alienate individuals from their lifeworld roles. But this alienation may also be interpreted as having an upside, to the extent that ................. 16924$ $CH3 08-13-08 08:15:23 PS Opinion and the Re-Formation of the Individual 125 the lifeworld itself is transformed from a sphere of determinism to a...