How does rationality function in creating social grammars?
Is rationality a filter or a guide? Does it function negatively, as a brake on pluralism and an entry guard prohibiting the acceptance of "irrational" suggestions for novelty? Or does it function positively as a guide suggesting new directions for self-change?
Could there be a third choice? Perhaps, as a formal demand for justification? But that only gives justification in the sense that given the failure of a project we have a justification for a new one being needed, but this by itself gives no positive guidance except that retrospectively we may see that a new one redoes the old better, perhaps redefining its goals in the process.
Robert Pippin* sees justification that way, with guidance coming from the fact that deep down there is only one goal, self-conscious freedom, which becomes clearer as a goal over time.
So a large question is whether there is an overall project that can be shown to be necessary, or perhaps to be discovered in the failures of local projects as an underlying reason for the failures. Then that underlying goal can itself be taken as a project, self-consciously, which is what it then means to be modern, a la Weber and Habermas?
But how can that be done without creating an empty goal? The problem is the application of the overall goal to the particulars of any local situation. That seems to call for Aristotelian practical wisdom.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001