Freud, Hegel, Habermas, Dove, and Semiotics

A while back Ted said he was trying to understand the Habermas value-add to Freud. That was a big deal with the students/faculty at the Graduate Faculty of the New School, where I went to grad school in philosophy in 1974-75. Most of them had an ideological attitude about it. They believed symbols and signs necessarily mediate human relationships, and so human behaviour cannot be understood using the methods of the physical sciences, which formulate hypotheses and then test them thru a controlled experimental framework. Rather a rational study of human behaviour can only be based on textual interpretation of the signs and symbols that are the basis for human interaction. This of course is hermeneutics (although Habermas did not consider himself to be in this school or any other).

Hermeneutics originated as the interpretation of biblical text. Freud got it right they said with his dream interpretation theory, where he analyzed dreams as texts full of symbols and signs. But he misunderstood his own theory, thinking that all this could ultimately be explained by brain and neural chemistry: "Freud's scientisitc self-misunderstanding", they used to say. Reminds me of how Hegel would say some level of consciousness "was still to itself obscure" (awkward but cool translation from the German).

Habermas fits in here somewhere, as he says human behaviour is about language games and dreams are about unresolved language games and repression is revealed in "systematically distorted communication." In a cruel way, it was funny to hear him say this with his severe hairlip. The repression theme is obviously in line with Freud, as is "systematically": Freud claimed no slip of the tongue is an accident.

Present-day philosophers don't say they do philosophy, they say they do semiotics, often combined with philology. Umberto Eco is an example of a semioticist (?), he was a professor of semiotics for many years before he began writing novels. All mainstream philosophy since Hegel and Nietzche has been reduced to philosophy of language, with the logical positivists and on one side and the hermeneutics and semiotics folks on the other. Semiotics is a meta-discussion of meaning: i.e. what is the meaning of meaning.

Ken Dove, the philosophy professor at Yale who influenced and inspired me the most (I attended the Graduate Faculty in NYC to study under him) had as always a distinctly different view from anyone else, one that was largely based on his interpretation of Hegel. He said that linguistics cannot serve as a model for human interaction, as the domain of linguistics falls short of binding humans to agreements and creating insitututions, and cannot serve as a foundation for legal, ethical or moral behaviour. Hegel's Philosophy of Right is a logical analysis (Hegelian logic) of how legal rules are binding in a way that is ultimately inadequate and gives way to the ethical domain, which in the same manner leads to the moral domain. A "domain of language" is not even considered.

In conclusion: "We must be mindful of Hegel", Ted Zuschlag's summary of a Hegel seminar held at Wesleyan U. circa 1972.