Presuppositions: A Reply to Benhabib and Jay Raymond Geuss Originally published on Medium by the Hannah Arendt Center, 11 July 2019.
I am grateful to the Editors of Medium for sending me a copy of Professor Benhabib’s response to my comments on her defense of Habermas, and I wonder if I might reply to her and also to some comments by Professor Martin Jay which appeared recently in the Point. Of course, in everyday life we all—but who exactly is “we”?—make innumerable presuppositions and assumptions about the world, have commitments to and expectations about others, and would dearly love to be able to live up to various ideals we have in various ways acquired and invented. What is perhaps more important, we would dearly love to hold others to (unrealized) ideals we have, and would like (in some cases) to impose commitment to these ideals on them. If I speak French to a waiter in Lille, it is because I assume he will understand that language, and I presuppose all sorts of other things in our encounter. I also project onto him various ideas about how I think he ought to behave toward me. None of this is at issue; it is taken for granted and trivial. If that is all Habermas has to say—here are a set of presuppositions we make, they are connected with many of our other institutions and we think they are bloody important—he is, as my friend Konrad Cramer thought, philosophically irrelevant. He hasn’t said anything interesting yet. Things move on only when we go on to ask three further questions: 1. How fixed and invariable are the assumptions and presuppositions “we” make, or that “we” could make? 2. What reasons or grounds do I have for presupposing what I presuppose? 3. What expectations and commitments can I properly impose on you? I contrast two sets of responses to these questions, the transcendentalist (say, “Kant”) and the nontranscendentalist (say, “Dewey”). The transcendentalist thinks (question 1) that at least some of our basic “presuppositions” are very fixed indeed, perhaps even couldn’t be changed; (question 2) that I have some very special grounds for making at least some of the basic presuppositions I (always) make; (question 3) that I have some noncontextual reason for imposing (some of) my commitments on you. Kant and Habermas disagree about the answer to question 2: Kant appeals to “special grounds” purportedly 106
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