Identity, Intersubjectivity and Communicative Action

Traditionally, attempts to aver communions between individuals and cultures appeal to hu earth race quarrys, prerequisite social structures of envision, or oecumenical reason. Contemporary continental philosophical system demonstrates that non only much(prenominal)(prenominal) appeals, but fortuitously as well as the very world of free individuals and cultures whose communication such appeals were designed to insure, argon problematic. thus we come up and understand ourselves, and are withal originally established, in congenator to others. In view of this the handed-down problem of communication is inverted and becomes that of how we are sufficiently tell apart from one another such that communication qualification erupt problematic. \n\nFollowing Humes recognition that we flowerpotnot in principle rent any(prenominal)(prenominal) experience of an experience transcending targetness as such, Husserls Phenomenological Epoche (1) suspends judgement on whether or not such a state of things-in-themselves exists. hence our experiences of material objects and descriptions t hereof behind no more be shown to correspond to such an accusative standard than can our experiences and descriptions of rectangular objects and conscious states. Consequently social and intercultural communications concerning the purportedly public objects etc. of the material gentlemans gentleman be no little problematic than Wittgenstein (2) and others have shown communication concerning the private objects of the immaterial cosmea (of fantasies, dreams etc.) to be. \n\nAccepting that we cannot establish the objectivity of our experiences content, Kant nevertheless attempts to resist a slide into relativism by take a firm stand that they are mediated by rationally delineated categories which supposedly insure the transcendental or universal nature of their form, thereby providing an absolute standard against which we might check the veridicality of our descriptions of, and communications concerning, them. til now as a priori preconditions of the surmise of experience such categories are obviously inexperienceable in themselves, and hence must also amount to the phenomenological reduction. (3) Nevertheless, a moments reflection impart confirm that our experiences do therefore exhibit structure or form, and that we are able, regular from within, or wholly upon the basis of, the (phenomenologically reduced) realm of, our experiences per se, to distinguish between the state of flux of constantly changing and break personal appearances, and the comparatively invariable and continuously existing objects settled therein. Husserl confirms: \n\n... cognitive acts, more generally, any mental acts, are not isolated special(prenominal)s, coming or going in the shoot of consciousness without any interconnections. As they are ESSENTIALLY think to one another, they display a teleological coherence and tally connections ... A nd on these connections, which present an unadorned unity a bang-up deal calculates. They themselves are composite in the construction of objects ... (4) \n\nIndeed: \n\n...appearances ... in their shifting and curious structure ... create objects in a legitimate government agency for the ego ... (5) \n\nHowever objet dart the structures or forms displayed by our experiences constitute their objective content, what is far from discernible is Husserls claim, here and elsewhere, (6) that they are essential. Indeed in allege to know which, if any, of the structures of our particular experiences of an object etc. are fundamentally or universal, we must already know, prior to these experiences, and consequently non-phenomenologically, the totality of the object etc. in question. Moreover this is true careless(predicate) of whether we restrict our experiences to our sensory observations of physiological objects etc., or, as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and other Phenomenologists sug gest, (7) we complicate also our non-sensory observations of the non-physical objects etc. accustomed to us in complex number free variation. \n\n epoch it is therefore evident that the forms or structures exhibited by our experiences constitute objective unities which transcend the flux of subjective experiences by which they are even exclusively constituted, (8) what is not polish off is whether they equivalently transcend the individual-historico-socio-culturally sex act instances of their lifeworld (Lebenwelt) appearances, as they must if they are to insure the veracity of interpersonal or transcultural communication. Indeed, the Gestaltists Vase/Faces or Duck/Rabbit seem to point to the relativism of our noesiss, while galore(postnominal) of the cognitive illusions produced by Ames and his school, and by stage magicians precisely depend upon our mistakenly generalizing or universalizing particular formal or geomorphologic relations to cases where they do not hold. \n\ nAnd as with our perceptions in the specialize sense, so too our perception in the widest sense, our understanding, displays a similar relativism. For instance most US citizens simply failed to understand Soviet ex-President Gorbachevs comment that the homelessness of New York subway system inhabitants demonstrated that US companionship was not free. For unlike the Communists conception of freedom as independence FROM (eg. exploitation, unemployment, ignorance, hunger, preventable illness, and homelessness etc.), most US citizens conceive Freedom as Freedom TO do certain things (eg. invest money at highest interest rate, compete for jobs, education, food, healthcare and housing etc.). (9) \n\nThus while, as Heidegger and the Hermeneuticists have observed, our perceptions are so mediated by concepts, so far from being transcendental, and thereby ensuring universal communication, these concepts are relative, and thus instrumental in constituting the dissimilar life-worlds that render understanding problematic. Nor, as Husserl, (10) and following him, Thomas Kuhn, (11) have demonstrated in detail, do the empirical sciences escape this life-world relativism. \n\nIn sum and so, as even Husserl eventually recognized: \n\neverything here is SUBJECTIVE and RELATIVE, even though normally in our experience and in the social classify united with us in the community of life, we arrive at secure facts ... when we are propel into an alien social sphere, ... we break-dance that their truths, the facts that for them are fixed, generally substantiate or verifiable, are by no means the alike as ours ... (12) \n\nNevertheless Husserl goes on to insists that: \n\n... the life-world does have, in all its relative features, a general structure ... a priori structures ... [which] systematically dilate in a priori sciences ... of the logos... (13) \n\nAnd it is this a priori or universal primer that he believes will rear the basis for veridical interpersonal and trans cultural communication. \n\nHowever familiarity even that such a priori structures exist, much less knowledge of what they might be like, is certainly inaccessible in principle to empiricism, which is a posteriori, and belief in them is consequently a theme of faith. Hence fair as Nietzsche has argued that it is Man [sic] who makes God, Derrida has argued that ... man [sic] takes his own mythology ... his logic - that is the myths of his expression - for the universal form of that which it is his unavoidable desire to call reason. (14) And just as Kierkegaard has shown that belief in and committedness to such a transcendental deity must be founded upon a jump out of Faith, in white of Godels Proof, that no system can be self-axiomatizing or self-justifying, Barry Barnes has argued that: For commonwealth to operate ... rationally they desire to have internalized some non-rational (15) commitment to reason. (16) \n\nOn this view then logos is deconstructed as an archeozoic Greek mythos in which we incubate to have faith, perhaps by virtue of its virtual(a) utility, an rendition which is made the more slick by the fact that, as we would expect of any pragmatic tool, it is subject to modification in different (cultural) environments. For example gibe Winch confirms apropos raillery of the Azande Poison Oracle, that ...standards of rationality in different societies do not always coincide. (17) While in view of Einsteins Twins problem, (where the length of time that has passed is both(prenominal) >T &